Forum OpenACS Development: Re: OCT

I can only give my personal view on the situation, i am not sure, how many people in the OCT have the same view on the matters.

In the very first beginning OpenACS went out to be something like a high level operating system for Web-Applications on a much higher level than aolserver: factor out common code, that has to be programmed all over in various applications into a common core, provide a complete persistent storage based on relational databases. In this respect, the goals are quite similar to e.g. the SAP kernel.

In this area, OpenACS was and is a success. We have various projects out there, ranging from e.g. DotLRN over ]po[, quest to various forks using the same kernel and the same data model. I would also count the xo* packages (xowiki, content flow, s5, request broker, the work at Gallileo and Viaro, etc.) as an own project. There are many other applications out there that share a certain part of the same kernel, you know them most likely better than me, since you are longer part of the community. Many OpenACS installations are essentially forks of the common code.

The various projects have different goals. For example ]po[ has the goal to be a web-based SAP on the longer range (my impression), while DotLRN has a strong emphasis on accessibility, and xo* has the goal to develop object oriented high level "end user development tools" to improve the code reuse and reduce the need to write code for various applications.

On top of this, there are various large and successful applications (e.g. like learn@wu) which have their own goals and needs. As another group of forces, we have several companies with different kind of goals. Frank made a nice presentation at the last OpenACS conference about different goals and needs of "service companies" vs. "product companies". While service companies have the goal to ship a clean and lean kernel (push everything dangerous out), and to provide services to make from this kernel useful software, the "product companies" need a certain featurism to prove the software is ready to compete now. They care much less about what's happening under the hood.

From this point of view, there is no single answer to your question, what "the aim of the project is now". Maybe this is a major difference to the "glorious days of AD" or to Joomla etc. We have various projects. Since at least 5.2, OpenACS is reduced to the core which is essentially maintained (bug fixes, speed and code improvements, adaptations for e.g. PostgreSQL 8.3, etc., accessibility). Several of the application packages (forums to filestore) are de facto part of DotLRN. OTOH more and more code is thrown out of DotLRN and is be replaced by standard kernel code, which is a good process.

In my point of view, one of the strengths of OpenACS/AD is that professional companies develop code and provide it as OpenACS packages. This strenght is up to a certain point as well a weakness. When this companies have different goals (or being sold etc.), the donated code is left without maintenance. On the longer term, an ongoing commitment to the provided code is essential (like e.g. for the xo* packages) to establish a good code and service quality.

So, if you contribute code (highly appreciated), it is quite early to ask, whether the code will be added to the core. A big question is, whether you can and will continue to work on the code, or whether you see this as an "own" project or part of some other projects.

In the last year, we had about 1200 commits to the OpenACS code repository. So we have some very active developments there. But there is likely to be nobody with the resources to take over the development and maintenance of your code. From my point of view, if you can't continue to work on, then this new code will have to wait for (maybe new) projects to continue, or until some volunteer steps up...