Forum OpenACS Q&A: OpenACS/ArsDigita software distinction?

Is the ACS kit that ArsDigita uses/contributes to the same as that
of OpenACS (minus the proprietary stuff contracted for clients)?
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Posted by Roberto Mello on
OpenACS is based on the toolking originally developed at ArsDigita. The project forked from the ArsDigita code-base a long time ago. OpenACS has heavily modified and enhanced the original code-base.

ArsDigita then went on to develop a Java version of the toolkit, which is incompatible with the GPL, so we're not porting it.

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Posted by Russell McBride on
Thanks Roberto,

OpenACS then is strictly tcl then, I assume. But I thought that to get database abstraction so that the toolkit worked for both Oracle and PostgreSQL JDBC was used. Is that not correct?

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Posted by Ben Adida on
JDBC is not used in OpenACS, nor would it provide the real level
of abstraction that we need. Note that JDBC is Java-specific
anyways, but assuming it weren't, it would still not fulfill our
needs.

Sometimes (often, even) queries need to be completely rewritten
from Oracle to PG (or from PG to Oracle), especially when stored
procedures are involved. Since the strength of OpenACS 4.x lies
in part in its strong use of stored procedure abstractions, we
need something that will recognize the DBMS used and properly
dispatch to the right query, which often cannot be automatically
generated.

Our query dispatcher allows you to store all of your queries in
XML format, separate from the Tcl code. Thus, you can have a
DB expert come in and optimize queries at any time, fix them up
for a new DB, etc.. without ever touching the code logic.