Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Top Ten Priorities for OpenACS ... what are yours?

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17: Re: Top Ten Priorities for OpenACS ... what are yours? (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 10/24/03 03:56 PM
Joel,

We are in agreement. I think one way to ease development is to remove the requirement to write pl/sql code as much as possible. There are already some ways to do this in the toolkit. Right now acs-service-contract has a Tcl API which is much easier to use than the pl/sql calls previosuly required.

We should continue to build these types of tcl apis for most pl/sql functions. In addition to required less database specific XQL files, it also allows for additional features such as caching to be centralized.

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18: Re: Top Ten Priorities for OpenACS ... what are yours? (response to 17)
Posted by Jeff Davis on 10/24/03 04:12 PM
I think my priorities are:
  • More duplicated functionality. We definitely need forums-lite-new and lite-forums-threaded to complement current packages
  • Longer function names (eg. I find ec_price_price_name_shipping_price_tax_shipping_tax_for_one_item nowhere near descriptive enough).
  • More deprecated procs, although said deprecated procs should be used pervasively in the toolkit.
  • Service contracts are too easy to debug. We need to add at least two more layers of abstraction there for them to be useful.
  • Our markup is too clean. We need more tables, we need much more hardcoded styling and more physical markup. html 2.0 transitional would be a good goal.
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19: Re: Top Ten Priorities for OpenACS ... what are yours? (response to 18)
Posted by Andrei Popov on 10/24/03 04:56 PM
I'll second the last one :)

Besides the obvious (ship/test/upgrade to 5.0) ones, I'd say documentation is *extremly* important.  All the plethora of vaorious how-to's that many people were posting here and there how each particular core module works/can be used/can be abused -- would be great to have it in a single place (a Knowledge Manager?).

Remembering ACS3 days, I'd say that it was a lot easier to jump the wagon back then -- even if things were a lot less elegant.  Now it is quite tough -- and there are no guarantees :)