Forum OpenACS Q&A: offtopic: InterWorld experience?

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1: offtopic: InterWorld experience?
Posted by Adam Farkas on 08/14/01 01:01 AM
This is somewhat off-topic, but I ask for your wisdom in the name of diversity:

has anyone had experience with Interworld? (http://www.interworld.com) They make what looks like another toolkit for building DB-backed sites. It seems to have been used by a few large clients (http://www.okidata.com)

It is closed-source, but it looks to me like the company might be in its death-throes ( http://finance.yahoo.com/q? s=ITWR.OB&d=c&t=2y&l=on&z=b&q=l ).

I was wondering if anyone had actually worked with their stuff. Is it any good? Perhaps there are some ideas (data model, etc.) that we can take away from their product, and incorporate into openacs.

I've actually emailed the folks their to see if they'd consider GPL'ing the code. (going from a market cap of $4B to $500k in 15 months might make them want to reconsider their current business model...)

So.. anyone out there played with this thing?

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2: Response to offtopic: InterWorld experience? (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on 08/14/01 01:06 AM
Hey, they've trademarked "Mission-Ready" so they gotta be good, right?
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3: Response to offtopic: InterWorld experience? (response to 1)
Posted by Talli Somekh on 08/14/01 01:09 AM
I don't know anything about this system although I am encouraged that they are moving towards "full J2EE compliance."

Don, I know a company that has trademarked, "Information for Everyone." Talk about double talk...

talli

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4: Response to offtopic: InterWorld experience? (response to 1)
Posted by Adam Farkas on 08/14/01 01:11 AM
ROTFL. I do my best to separate "The Product" from "The Marketing" these days... After all, some firms can go from a web toolkit company to a Content Management Solutions Provider overnight, with nary a change in a single line of code 😊
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5: Response to offtopic: InterWorld experience? (response to 1)
Posted by Talli Somekh on 08/14/01 01:30 AM
As long as the Good Doctor has distracted everybody form porting...

Has anyone played with <a href=http://www.masonhq.com>Mason (http://www.masonhq.com)</a>? It seems like an OpenACSish product in Perl. From what I understand, it defines an API. But that's about all I understand.

talli

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6: Response to offtopic: InterWorld experience? (response to 1)
Posted by Rodger Donaldson on 08/14/01 01:53 AM
Mason's great, and it's autohandlers and dhandlers take a huge amount of work out of working up a site framework; it as a reasonable nice OO-ish view of the world.

However, Mason is primarily an API - while a library of code is beginning to appear, it's nowhere near as rich as the one you get with OpenACS (which is why I've done some work on generating a Perl API to access the OpenACS datamodel).  The datamodel and library of code in OpenACS is IMO the most compelling thing about it.

(For those wondering about autohandlers and dhandlers:

An autohandler is code executed upon every request to the site hierarchy living below it.  By calling itself as a method operating on the pages, you can stuff all of your framework in the autohandler and everything in the directory tree under it need only be the content specific to that page.

dhandlers provide a convenient way of mapping default behaviour to a hierarchy when files corresponding to requests aren't available.  One example would be a news site, where a request to /breaking/news.html would grab news.html if it was present, or gab /news/dhandler if it wasn't.

Since you can also trivially extract URI components from a request, your dhandlers can do nice clean variable passing - for example, for stories on our news site, we might have an /archives/dhandler.  Pointers to old stories might take the form /archives/2001/2/32/greenspun, at which point the dhandler is invoked with 2001/2/32/greenspun passed as a variable.  Do a split() and you're ready to populate your DB request, and silly spiders and proxys that refuse to handle GET requests in an RFC compliant maner are fooled.
)

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7: Response to offtopic: InterWorld experience? (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on 08/14/01 02:09 AM
In other words, sorta like the AOLserver filters and registered procs we've been using for years and years?  Or did I miss something Deep? :
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8: Response to offtopic: InterWorld experience? (response to 1)
Posted by Rodger Donaldson on 08/14/01 02:55 AM
Probably not.  For that matter, dhandlers and autohandlers are nice wrappers around mod_perl functionality.  But syntactic sugar is everything...
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9: Response to offtopic: InterWorld experience? (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on 08/14/01 03:09 AM
Hmmm..."syntactic sugar" and "perl" in the same sentence grates on the ears.  Whatever it might be, it ain't sugar.  Python's somewhat elegant, but ... perl?
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10: Response to offtopic: InterWorld experience? (response to 1)
Posted by Rodger Donaldson on 08/14/01 12:13 PM
I like Perl's syntax, overall.  And having aquired too many new white hairs from battling with TCL in my day job, Perl seems positively sane.

But nothing's worse than a lanuage war, I'll simply say that one mans' sugar is another mans salt.

(Actually, I like salt, so perhaps that's not so appropriate...)

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11: Response to offtopic: InterWorld experience? (response to 1)
Posted by Rodger Donaldson on 08/14/01 12:17 PM
Jesus.  What crack was I on when I formed my possessives in that sentence?
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12: Response to offtopic: InterWorld experience? (response to 1)
Posted by Jamie Ross on 08/14/01 04:34 PM
I actually worked alongside a team implementing Interworld at a site ccplanet.com where it was used for catalog management (I think it is still used at sister site, gaiam.com).  The company doing the implementation (Q strategies) was very good and the product seemed okay.  I was implementing Vignette Storyserver in TCL and my team was able to complete things much faster and easier (IMHO) than the Interworld guys just because they were bogged down with Java and app server stuff after which I have been very skeptical about the joys of web development in java.  Q Strategies was formed by a big block of consultants from Interworld who were not happy with leadership so not surprised Interworld is having hard times.