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."