Forum OpenACS Q&A: Bitzi uses ACS

1: Bitzi uses ACS

Posted by Luke Francl on 05/25/01 04:16 AM

I was tooling about Bitzi's website (http://www.bitzi.com/; they're doing something like CDDB, but for arbitrary file types), and a strange feeling hit me. Some of the pages (in particular, their login page) looked very much like the ACS. So, I hit Netcraft, and sure enough they're running AOLserver/3.2+ad12.

I searched both ArsDigita's site and OpenACS and I couldn't find any mention of this site. Are they somebody's client? Members of the community? Or just random folks who downloaded ACS and set up a site with it?

Anyway, it's good to see more ACS sites.

2: Response to Bitzi uses ACS (response to 1)

Posted by Ben Adida on 05/25/01 04:24 AM

Looks like ACS Classic 4.x....

http://www.bitzi.com/doc/

3: Response to Bitzi uses ACS (response to 1)

Posted by Mike Linksvayer on 05/25/01 04:55 AM

Oops, forgot to remove the /doc directory in acs-subsite. We're using ACS4/Tcl and doing all development inhouse. I just submitted Bitzi to aD's list of ACS sites, hopefully it will show up there soon.

I would've loved to use PostgreSQL and would for almost any other web project. If Bitzi is successful, we'd push far beyond what anyone has tried with PG so far, and we can't afford to pioneer areas that aren't core to the business (that's one reason using ACS was such a no-brainer). I hope Bitzi will be the last project I feel a need to use a proprietary database for.

CDDB is one of our models, though we're certainly not going to follow their example of screwing the community! If you're interested in this sort of issue, check out our 'OpenBits' project, and in general check out InfoAnarchy and a recent article on Bitzi there.

4: Response to Bitzi uses ACS (response to 1)

Posted by Todd Gillespie on 05/26/01 02:54 AM

I chanced to meet Linksvayer @ Greenspun's latest One-Day lecture in Millbrae. I formed an impression of him being a very well-informed character, which finds me all the more suprised by his post - "If Bitzi is successful, we'd push far beyond what anyone has tried with PG so far".

Mike, them's fightin' words.

We've already seen some very impressive sites built with Postgres; we also know the standard litany of Postgres/Oracle shortcomings -- what are you missing? Moreover - scanning the bitzi plan, I would assume that success translates into a very large number of machines in quite a small amount of time -- the licensing costs for Oracle could be prohibitive bordering on terrifying.

Anyway, glad to see you here.

5: Response to Bitzi uses ACS (response to 1)

Posted by Mike Linksvayer on 05/29/01 04:19 AM

I'm only well-informed enough to know I'm ignorant and stupid.

I'm happy to hear that "...beyond what anyone has tried with PG so far" are "fightin' words". Makes me even more confident to recommend PG and to hope Bitzi will be the last project I choose Oracle for.

The PG FAQ notes that 60 gigabyte databases "exist". For Oracle, that size is routine, and Bitzi will be much larger. AFAICT PG doesn't have any support for replication/failover/clustering and the like. Oracle is simply proven to scale to the levels Bitzi expects in the fairly short term, while PG isn't (that isn't to say PG can't scale to those levels now, or perhaps next version, but I'll let someone else be the test case). FWIW, I wouldn't have considered SQL Server for something the scale of Bitzi either. Not that I could stand working with Windows anyway...

Oracle Intermedia is also a really nice feature to have.

In the slightly longer term, a RDBMS may not be the right architecture for persisting and querying metatdata at all (consider that AFAIK none of the major web search engines are backed by a RDBMS). But for now web/db development sure is easy.

And yeah, Oracle licenses are pretty exorbitant. That's life. At least we don't have any need for Oracle applications or consultants. I've heard tales from the recent dotcom implosion of startups having burned through the majority of their VC money on the same.

6: Response to Bitzi uses ACS (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 05/29/01 04:47 AM

AFAICT PG doesn't have any support for replication/failover/clustering and the like.

There is some support for replication in PG 7.1. It's mostly a framework, is query-based so not likely to be a good performer. But at least it's possible now if you're willing to do the work.

Future plans are to replicate from the WAL (REDO log in the Oracle world). May or may not happen by PG 7.2.

Failover is also on the plate for the future.

None of this is meant to suggest you be a guinea pig. For one thing, the existing replication stuff is definitely a low-rent solution, probably not adequate for heavy-duty use.

It is clear that the major corporate winner of the .com revolution was Oracle Corporation, I doubt you'll get much disagreement over that. Sun and Cisco sold a bunch more iron, sure, but AFAIK only Oracle managed to force folks to buy a license for the web which was considerably higher for a license on the same machine if it weren't being used as a webserver.

Can you imagine Cisco trying to sell routers for 4x their normal price if they were to be plugged into a network serving a large website?

7: Response to Bitzi uses ACS (response to 1)

Posted by Mike Linksvayer on 05/31/01 04:39 AM

Thanks for the update on replication. I also see noted in the OpenACS 4.x Project Status document that a Russian has developed a full text search engine for PG. Very cool.

Soon, the only reason for using Oracle is support for legacy applications and knowledge. Unfortunately that's probably the most important factor, and why most people are still using Windows.

The interesting thing about Oracle's dominance is that unlike Windows, there's no I want to use the file format everyone else is using network effect.

8: Re: Bitzi uses ACS (response to 1)

Posted by Ilya Zharskiy on 07/23/05 03:32 PM

i want 2 run bitzi-like webservice @ our city-area-ADSL-network (free traffic, a lot of eMule servers, direct connect hubs)
where 2 begin from?