Forum OpenACS Development: Re: The future of OpenACS

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11: Re: The future of OpenACS (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on
I am not sure comparing ANY package to assessment is fair :)

That said, I just want to address the multiple CSS issue. Its not an issue at all.

Having specific CSS in a specific place makes sense. Although it does make the page load slowly.

In this case, what we really need is a tool that understands CSS. Lee started work on that (template::head) which makes OpenACS aware of the CSS/JS etc. Once OpenACS is aware of this, it can dynamcially create and cache consolidated CSS/JS files that load quickly, but still allow for modularity.

Gustaf, XoTcl code might be faster but so far its incredibly difficult for most OpenACS developers to read. Processors are cheap and programmers are expensive. As I said before, having consisten code is a goal, but so far there hasn't been any effort to produce any sort of documentation on how to USE XoTcl wisely within the OpenACS framework. Unfortunately, until that happens you'll end up doing all the work yourself.

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Posted by Steve Manning on
"Gustaf, XoTcl code might be faster but so far its incredibly difficult for most OpenACS developers to read. Processors are cheap and programmers are expensive. As I said before, having consisten code is a goal, but so far there hasn't been any effort to produce any sort of documentation on how to USE XoTcl wisely within the OpenACS framework. Unfortunately, until that happens you'll end up doing all the work yourself."

I would concur with this. I've been using XOWiki for the last couple of weeks as it looks like a perfect fit for an upcoming project but I find it hard work to figure out whats going on. I'm not new to OO (don't get me started on J2EE!) and I've read the tutorial on XOTcl http://media.wu-wien.ac.at/doc/tutorial.html and worked through the code but I'm still struggling to figure out how some of it works.

I appreciate the time Gustaf has spent on this and I can see the advantages that he talks about. I think it could be very productive but its not going to be taken up for other packages and projects simply because we can't work out how to do it.

Perhaps what we need is an "XOTcl in OpenACS" tutorial along the lines of the XOTcl Tutorial.