Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to A Technical Paper on Java

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Posted by Michael Feldstein on

In terms of the tone I am trying to suggest, you can see something very much like what I'm thinking in Don's March 16th posts (particularly the first one) on this thread:

http://www.arsdigita.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg%5 fid=000bcs&topic%5fid=web%2fdb&topic=

Two caveats. First, I'm not qualified to judge how close Don's actual argument is to Ben's. Fortunately, I'm not talking about the specific positions. I'm talking about tone and rhetorical approach.

Second, it's not yet clear how similar the question that Don was trying to answer is to the one that Ben is taking on. Don was answering the question, "In an ideal world, what language would you build the ACS in today?" I'm not entirely sure what question Ben is trying to answer. It might be something like, "In the real world, why has the OpenACS team chosen the language/environment strategy it has?" In that case, I like Don's tone very much as a model. You could sharpen up the advocacy and still maintain an even-handed approach. On the other hand, the question Ben is trying to answer might also be something more focused, like "Why hasn't the OpenACS team followed ArsDigita into embracing Java?" An article answering the latter question would appropriately be more like the "Why not mySQL" article that Ben wrote earlier, which is, in fact, roughly similar in tone to the current draft. So I guess it all comes down to what the goal is for the paper.

Personally, I find the first question more interesting and compelling than the second one, and I think it would appeal to a broader audience than the relatively small community of people who think of their choices in terms of ACS Java vs. OpenACS.

But if Ben's goal is to write a direct response to ACS Java then it wouldn't be entirely fair of me to criticize him for the paper he didn't write. I'm just offering suggestions that hopefully will help ensure that this paper does what it sets out to do (whatever that is).

If the goal is simply to do nothing more than respond to pressure for a full Java port, then I withdraw my earlier suggestion. Instead, I suggest that the title of the paper be changed to "Why not Java?" I would also suggest that the sentence, "This paper describes the technical reasoning behind the OpenACS decision to stick with the AOLserver/Tcl environment while making limited and well-targeted use of Java. be changed to something more like, "This paper describes the technical reasoning behind the OpenACS decision to choose the AOLServer/Tcl environment over the Java platform, while still making limited and well-targeted use of existing Java resources."