Forum OpenACS Development: Is the singleton paradigm obsolet?

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1: Is the singleton paradigm obsolet?
Posted by Michael Aram on 05/10/08 11:57 AM
I'm trying to set up a couple of websites within a single openacs instance using subsites and host-node-map.

Beside the fact, that this mechanism is far away from being stable (or well integrated), as described here (http://www.openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs/bug?bug%5fnumber=3128) , it is seems quite impossible to me to do this in a beautiful way.

One thing is, that every singleton package, which is automounted under the siteroot isnt usable inside such a "virtual host". Thus, you cannot, for example switch the language, because there is no sitenode http://vhost.example.com/acs-lang . Furthermore one cannot work around this by mounting the package twice.

This is only one example. There are lots of packages (categories, notifications, search,...) which are facing the same problems.

So what could be the solution to this problem? Convert every package to a non-singleton package for the next major release of openacs?

For many of the packages, that are singletons now it would make sense, IMHO. The search package could be modified to optionally search only "below" its "mount point parent site node". The categories package could be "subsites" and "dotlrn" aware, thus providing categories only to communities or subsites. And so on...

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2: Re: Is the singleton paradigm obsolet? (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 05/10/08 02:27 PM
I think you are on to something here. I had imagined that singletons could be singleton per subsite, so that it was still clear its a special type of package.

This is one of the major issues I noticed with host-node mapping:
when sending notifications out, for bug-tracker for example, or generating RSS feeds, the content generates a link to the creation users profile page. This breaks if you use host node mapping. You would need to know which subsite/host node mappaing, the content was created under.

I think having acs_objects.packge_id, it is possible to scope category treess, notifications, search, etc to a subsite.

We would have to make sure folks that use subsites but don't use host node mapping were not inconvenienced. That is, subsite scoped cateogies, might not be necessary etc. Subsite search almost always should be an option.