Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Porting Project/Open (Intranet Module) to OpenACS 5.0

12: Re: Porting Project/Open (Intranet Module) to OpenACS 5.0 (response to 1)

Posted by Frank Bergmann on 12/18/03 06:22 PM

Hi Don,

I think it's important to understand the different priorities of OpenACS and P/O to avoid unnecessary negative emotions in the future. Because at the end the community lives from the contributions of its member and members from the support of the community:

I supose the priorities for the OpenACS leadership team are to guarantee the interoperability of the code and to maintain coherence in the community. Is that more or less correct?

The current priorities of the P/O team are:
1. Satisfy some customers
2. Get P/O running on 4.6 and
3. Get rid of Oracle in order to involve more community members and to extend the potential customer base.
4. Adapt P/O to 4.6/5.0 object, permissions, templates etc.

That's because without some quick results from 1 there are not 2 and 3 and 4. And 2 is a necessary step before 3 and 4. I hope that sounds reasonable.

Concerning the adaptation to objects, permissions and templates:

- I'm not 100% happy with the permission management as it exists with P/O today, because it is currently a function of the user profile and it doesn't take into account object characteristics, which is necessary in many cases. Also, there is quite some code redundancy. So a reorganization of permissions could lead to a permission system integrated with the rest of OpenACS.
- P/O employs hardly any content management functionality so all the related OpenACS functionality doesn't apply.
- The application of templates to "components" (~portlets?) is an open question that we need to discuss more in detail.

So the area of potential "conflict" is actually quite limited. I propose that we continue the discussion in February when priority 2 is finished and eveybody can analyze the P/O code on their own systems. I'm curious to see how much interest is going to be exhibited by the community to advance with priorities 3 and 4. I still wonder why the old Intranet module hasn't been ported and published yet...

Cheers,
Frank

13: Re: Porting Project/Open (Intranet Module) to OpenACS 5.0 (response to 12)

Posted by Jade Rubick on 12/18/03 08:20 PM

Hi Frank,

If you have a choice about it, I would recommend OpenACS 5.0 as your target platform instead of 4.6. It's a huge leap forward, and better to target that than 4.6 and upgrade later IMO.

I think as you hang around here you'll find that all of us are busy satisfying our customers as well, and our focus is similar. Most of our development is client driven.

There are some issues to hash out here, but don't disappear until February! If you're planning on porting to OpenACS, you'll probably want some advice along the way while you're getting up to speed on OpenACS.

I don't think we have any problem with proprietary code on top of OpenACS, but generally you're not going to interest very many other people in working with your code unless you release your code under some sort of open source license. And GPL is the default here, so if you're wanting to release it under something else, that's fine, but it'll be up to you to convince developers to jump aboard. If it's in our self-interest, we will, and we'll be happy that you're contributing your code for all of our self-interests (including your own!). It's a win-win situation in my opinion.

Glad to have you here, and I'm looking forward to seeing P/O on OpenACS if you choose that route.