Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Updated Developer Tutorial (Was: Would OpenACS be a good choice for my web site?)

On Thu, 21 Aug 2008, mailto:torben@dekka.net wrote:

yes, apparently the email-reply broke during the server change.

Heavy sigh.

I agree with most of your statements. So, how do we go about doing them?

Get someone involved with update access to the web site to make any needed web site updates.

As for the tutorial:

Can you post your fixed tutorial version to https://openacs.org/storage ?

I don't have OpenACS installed at the moment. I can reinstall it over the weekend and go through the tutorial again to make sure I have all this right. But, if the bugs are fixed in the current tutorial there's still the problem that it's based on OpenACS as it was back before the content repository TCL API was complete. I think the following is what was needed to get the current tutorial working:

The first problem one hits with the tutorial is that the drop script will fail. The patch located at:

https://openacs.org/storage/file?file%5fid=585244

will fix that problem.

If one works through the tutorial step by step instead of just copying all the files using the "quick start" instructions at the beginning, they will eventually get to a point where it tells them to copy note-procs.tcl from
packages/acs-core-docs/www/files. For some reason, there are two versions of note-procs.tcl included in the tutorial. Both have bugs, but the one located at the above mentioned path has more bugs than the other one. So, they should copy note-procs.tcl from packages/acs-core-docs/www/files/tutorial instead.

There's also two other bugs in that version of note-procs.tcl. A discussion of them can be found in the IRC logs from July 19th, if you happen to have a local copy of the log from that date. In case there's someone who doesn't have a copy, but wants to see the log, I've put a copy at:

http://www.RawFedDogs.net/OpenACS-IRCLog-07-19-2008.txt

When one tries to add, or edit if there are notes in the database to edit, a note, one gets an "(exception NSDB, "Query was not a DML or DDL command.")" error. Derickl, on IRC, posted the following link:

http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/5789

with suggested code changes which seems to fix that problem. Code in both the add and edit procs need to be changed.

But, as I said, once the bugs are fixed, the tutorial is still outdated. Is it worth trying to fix it?

I think it would benefit from a complete rewrite. Ideally it would probably be best if the rewrite was done by someone who knows OpenACS like the back of their hand. Short of that, I made this offer on IRC and I'm still willing to give it a try. If someone would be willing to give me some example code, demonstrating current best practices, I'd be willing to try to dissect it, figure out how it works, and try to write up a tutorial from a newbie perspective. Anything I might come up with would probably
need to be polished by a member of the OpenACS community, and I'd very likely have lots of questions along the way. I think the tutorial should, at least, cover setting up a simple project that handles some type of relational data. An example I've seen used in other tutorials is a simple
book information system. Books can have one publisher and one or more authors.

Kevin
http://www.RawFedDogs.net
http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org
Bruceville, TX

Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla!!!