Forum OpenACS Q&A: Tutorial and Testing

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1: Tutorial and Testing
Posted by James Bennin on 08/13/03 04:34 PM
Now that I have OpenACS up and running, how do I go about testing the different packages? Which packages (installed or uninstalled) provide more user abilities? How do I go about starting using OpenACS (creating tcl, html or other scripts)? If this question has already been answered, please redirect me. Thank you James
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2: Re: Tutorial and Testing (response to 1)
Posted by Nagita Karunaratne on 08/13/03 06:54 PM
Hello James,

Everyone learns using their own methods but this is how I started (probably not the best):

  1. created a ER diagram of the core datamodel.
  2. created a ER diagram of each of the core modules, then went through the plsql code to to see how each module interacts with the overall and to learn the transactions on the datamodel.
  3. walk through the tcl code for the modules to see how the adp/tcl pages process the 'user experience'.
  4. try to model the page flow (although the best I have come up is the interaction flow diagrams used in some old Arsdigita documentation).
Suggestions:
  1. read the Internet Application Workbook. It has some of the reasoning for the datamodel structure.
  2. reading the documentation, forum postings, searching Google.
Keep in mind that most people take months of concentrated effort to become productive.
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4: Re: Tutorial and Testing (response to 1)
Posted by Nagita Karunaratne on 08/13/03 10:44 PM
Hi James,

In my the last sentence of my previous post I did not mean to be discouraging at all.

Anyway, these may be helpful:

OACS - A Framework for Web Applications

Bootcamp preparation

LinuxLab - Configuring an OpenACS Web Site

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5: Re: Tutorial and Testing (response to 2)
Posted by Roberto Mello on 08/14/03 10:37 PM
I don't think there's a need to study the entire core datamodel in detail unless you plan to modify or extend it.

If you just want to develop new packages, having the ER model of core and packages is helpful, but how much of it one will need to study it depends on what your package does.

As for (3), studying the templating system docs plus some examples from other packages is enough to get you started.

-Roberto

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6: Re: Tutorial and Testing (response to 3)
Posted by Matthias Melcher on 08/15/03 10:24 AM
Jade,

<blockquote> http://rubick.com/openacs/getting_started
</blockquote>

this link does not work (perhaps due to a missing slash at the end). Once found, this page contained another broken link, http://www.brasileiro.net/writings/openacs/oacs-4-6-small.jpg

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7: Re: Tutorial and Testing (response to 1)
Posted by Jade Rubick on 08/20/03 07:49 AM
Both links work for me, so if you have any more information on why they don't work, please send me an email and I'll fix it.
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8: Re: Tutorial and Testing (response to 1)
Posted by Jarkko Laine on 08/20/03 08:15 AM
Both work for me, too. Missing slash at the end shouldn't cause any problems to web servers, only a minimum extra time lag, since the request processor tests first if there's files with that name and only after that if there's such dir.
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9: Re: Tutorial and Testing (response to 1)
Posted by Marcin Kuczkowski on 08/20/03 11:35 AM
for me the link
http://rubick.com/openacs/getting_started
gets redirected to:
http://rubick.com:8002//openacs/rubick.com/openacs/getting_started/
which is not found of course

but I've found the page at:
http://rubick.com:8002/openacs/getting_started/

I am using MSIE 6.0 and my ISP does IP masquerading.