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

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Posted by Lamar Owen on
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).