Andrew, the point is that if you don't understand or appreciate why
OpenACS uses PostgreSQL rather than MySQL, then you're not even
vaguely competent to issue a technical critique of OpenACS. And
whether that's wnat you intended to do or not, that's certainly how
your post came across to me, and I think to many others as well.
To beat the dead horse some more (sorry, Talli): Andrew S. clearly is
much brighter and more knowledgeable than, say, our friend
Divya.
However, his original "feedback" was in fact neither questions nor
even suggestions, but a technical critique, and most unfortunately, an
un-informed technical critique at that. When you offer a
technical critique you are implicitly asserting that you know enough
about the subject at hand (e.g., database backed web sites) to give
the critique at least some validity. Most importantly, you have to
know what you don't know.
Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case in Andrew S.'s
original critique above, and thus was dismissed out of hand by many
readers here. A critique (as opposed to questions or suggestions) by
the uninformed is simply arrogance with nothing to stand on, and not
useful to anybody really.
Now, I'm being a bit too harsh here, as some of Andrew's comments -
for example, specific new user impressions of openacs.org - could
indeed be easily turned around into useful questions and suggestions.
Note that you need not completely expert in all ways for your critique
or argument to have some validity. For example, Eric Raymond's
The Art of Unix Programming
has at least a few statements which I happen to know are just plain
egregiously wrong, and worse, he leaves those statements completely
unsubstantiated. (E.g., various silly comments on Tcl not working for
any project with more than 2000 or so lines of Tcl code; utter
nonsense, and easily disproved by example.) But there is enough other
good info in that book for me to not dismiss it and its author out of
hand, and for me to think it does have some value and is worth
reading, despite a few obvious failures under my own technical spot
checking.
But any writer has to earn those "bys" that the reader gives
him when he says something the reader knows is incorrect, and
especially when the author doesn't explain his reasoning, but just
asserts his opinions unconditionally.
Now, from all known reports, compared to the "industry average", the
OpenACS toolkit and community are both unusually smart in the degree
they use and understand the RDBMS. So it would be nice if, as a
community, we were especially good at spreading RDBMS education via
articles, etc. (And I happen to think the same is probably true for
other tools like AOLserver and Tcl, but the FUD and misunderstandindg
out there about the RDBMS is so much more obvious, that the
the RDBMS is by far the best, clearest, most unquestionably true
example.)
This however, is hard, and a lot of work. Ben Adida's and Philip G.'s
old articles and books may be all we've generally got, but at least
they are pretty good! But the more high quality white papers, case
studies, articles, etc. we can point to from a FAQ to help inform
potential new adopters, the better. Something for us to think about
anyway...
