My impression was that the Tcl could just as well be described as "picked up and continued" rather than "forked" in the light of the ACS Roadmap
Almost right but slightly premature. aD *will* release a Tcl 4.3, and one aspect is fairly significant - changing of how HTML is quoted. I've read the doc (from the German office) and I agree with their analysis and changes. We'll want to track them. Hopefully we can get this rolled in by the OpenACS 4.x release time.
That's going to be most of the change for 4.3, it rates a new version number because customized pages may have to be changed to work with the new quoting rules.
Other than that, your comment's substantially correct. Ad will fix bugs that hit client sites, and do nothing more.
But I also thought the initial OpenACS 4 Oracle DDL would be largely identical to the ACS 4 Tcl Oracle DDL and ACS 4 java Oracle DDL, so no
"fork" there yet. Have I got that wrong?
Nope, you're right. Some details may change, i.e. the APM datamodel's different because it knows about package support for different databases now (the XML .info file is changed, too). We'll be enhancing the content repository to allow in-filesystem as well as in-database storage of binary content, and that will change the datamodel. There may be other slight enhancements and of course we'll fix bugs if we find them (which are usually in .tcl code, not the DDL, though).
"Oracle (with SQL abstraction support *shortly*)" (emphasis added) in a column that is headed "ACS 4.x, 5 Java". It doesn't seem to imply that this
won't happen until ACS 5.
All they mean by this is that their class design for the Java version will abstract out the interface to persistent storage, and operations on stuff stored there. They won't actually be supporting another database for many, many months. They don't plan to roll a full-featured ACS Java 4 release but rather work towards ACS Java 5. This may not be entirely clear from the roadmap but seemed very clear in the conference call.
One terminology clarification, the only ACS 4.x that is going to exist in full-blossomed form is the Tcl version. Since that's a recent decision there's still a lot of stuff lying around talking about an ACS Java 4.x full-featured release before ACS 5, and there's the existing core release of course.
So when I say that folks will find OpenACS 4.x more interesting than ACS 4.x, there's an implied "Tcl" adjective in each of those labels. I'm not saying that more folks will necessarily be interested in OpenACS Tcl than ACS Java ("OpenACS 4.x vs. ACS 5").
aD's change in path isn't that huge, they're just accelerating ACS 5 development by cutting ACS Tcl work off a bit more quickly than folks thought would happen a few months ago, and skipping the building of a fully fleshed-out ACS Java 4.x. It's left us with confusing terminology, though, when you go off and read threads, docs, talk on the phone, etc.
