Forum OpenACS Development: Why did you choose OpenACS (as a developer) ?

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1: Why did you choose OpenACS (as a developer) ?
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 11/07/03 08:44 AM
I'd like to collect information why you've chosen to develop with OpenACS, what have been the driving technical and social factors, anything that comes into you mind when asked: Why did you choose OpenACS ?
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2: Re: Why did you choose OpenACS (as a developer) ? (response to 1)
Posted by Andrei Popov on 11/07/03 11:25 AM

While this would be too far-fetched call for me to count self as a "developer", I can say that my reasons started more with curiousity (philg, aD, wtr, PANDA, and Tcl/SQL for Web Nerds), then the appreciation that I was getting quite a few things done quick and with very acceptible quality (much faster than in the LAMP (or LAPgP) case, since I was reusing a lot of ready-made code). After that, there came a "code-base" and "lock-in" state -- I know have no compelling reasons to switch to any other platform.

No, as said, I can't really count myself as a real developer -- but I like to tinker a lot with the toolkit. Still -- the €0.02, FWIW.

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3: Re: Why did you choose OpenACS (as a developer) ? (response to 1)
Posted by bill kellerman on 11/07/03 03:44 PM
- the information available on its background and the length of time it's been used (from acs until now)
- easy transition from my days with storyserver
- wanted an excuse to use aolserver and tcl
- i'm lazy.  i've had to write similar systems from scratch, and i realized openacs already did it and did it better
- the permissions system
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4: Re: Why did you choose OpenACS (as a developer) ? (response to 1)
Posted by Jade Rubick on 11/07/03 08:55 PM
- Phil's book attracted me to it at first.
- It seems to solve the problems I was trying to solve: user management, groups, permissions, versioning, etc..
- Initially, the availability of documentation was a big plus.
- Active user community.
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5: Re: Why did you choose OpenACS (as a developer) ? (response to 1)
Posted by Nagita Karunaratne on 11/07/03 11:10 PM
-active and knowledegable community
-in continuous development
-flexible (ie. open source)
-high performance web server
-operates on free *nix's
-lots of prebuilt functionality
-TCL is easy
-APM package manager and modular organization
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6: Re: Why did you choose OpenACS (as a developer) ? (response to 1)
Posted by Torben Brosten on 11/07/03 11:46 PM
as a developer in training:

performance scalability (with technical reasons supporting it) from PhilG's book etc

economic scalability (low entry costs, price scales with project size (because of performance scalability and open source)

customability (freedom to modify as needed, and responsibile for results that go with it)

available resources (open-source communities, documentation)

community collective behavior, on whole, consistent with long-term project vision, priorities, values

open-source (opportunity to contribute to something "big", opportunity to learn from competent quick-fixers and like minded long-term solution providers etc.).

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7: Re: Why did you choose OpenACS (as a developer) ? (response to 1)
Posted by Lamar Owen on 11/08/03 05:03 AM
Man, long answer coming.

I got started with AOLpress back in 1996.  AOLpress led to AOLserver when we put a server up in 1997.  AOLserver connects to PostgreSQL.  I got interested in Philg's work as a result of links on the then AOLserver developer's site (at PrimeHost, IIRC).  This was prior to the founding of aD.  Philg had photo.net, and several modules for AOLserver, including the infamous Bill Gates wealth clock.  The bboards and other modules worked with Illustra at the time, but Illustra wasn't available on Linux.  The other database available was Oracle, after a driver was written.  At the time PostgreSQL was not enough database to handle the job (this was, after all, in the days of PostgreSQL 6.3!).

In the meantime I built our Internet and Intranet sites for WGCR on PostgreSQL 6.3.2, backing AOLserver 2.3.  Later I took on the PostgreSQL RPMset maintenance, and had RPMs distributed with Red Hat Linux 6.1.  This was PostgreSQL 6.5.  Pg was at this point up to the task of running the young ACS (2.x).

Discussions happened with Ben Adida and Don Baccus about ACS for PostgreSQL (ACS/pg).  Roberto Mello joined in.

The rest is documented history.  I still have archives of the mailing list; seeing the source forge project go away was bittersweet.

WGCR's Internet site (wgcr.net) is OpenACS backed.

My new job as Director of IT for PARI doesn't leave me as much time to hack OpenACS as I would like; but we may be rolling a DotLRN site at some point.

Why do I still choose OpenACS?  Nostalgia for one. 😊  Technical excellence for another.  Great architecture for another. (the templating system is sweet once you get used to it).

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8: Re: Why did you choose OpenACS (as a developer) ? (response to 1)
Posted by Mark Aufflick on 11/11/03 03:38 PM
i think it's all been said, but my top reasons are:

* templating system (including ad_form, tight integration with db_ procs)
* many existing modules to play with
* existing architecture that is a good point between being rigid and flexible from which to launch your own apps
* package manager encourages feeding apps back to the community
* commercial quality design and implementation

that last point is a big one. We are in a very interesting situation I think. We are now able to move more flexibally to a better solution than a single commercial entity would be - but we are blessed with a very well designed core set of ideas that would probably not have been designed so well had ACS been developed from scratch as an open source product.

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9: Re: Why did you choose OpenACS (as a developer) ? (response to 1)
Posted by Lamar Owen on 11/12/03 12:40 AM
ACS _was_ developed as an open source product.  Just happened to have a company behind it.
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10: Re: Why did you choose OpenACS (as a developer) ? (response to 9)
Posted by Tilmann Singer on 11/15/03 09:42 PM
I first noticed ACS when a former colleague pointed me to the hilarious recruiting page of arsdigita: http://web.archive.org/web/20000510060828/www.arsdigita.com/pages/jobs/recruiting (archived without the Ferrari photo unfortunately). From there I started reading philipps books, the bboards etc. - a typical route propably. I was working with java and php on developing web systems then, which tended to reinvent common concepts again and again, so I was easy to convince I guess.

The two concepts that drew me most to (Open)ACS, deserve to be emphasized again, although they have been mentioned already: