Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Apache support critical

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Posted by Mark Aufflick on
Not that there is much more to add, but here are my 2c + GST on various issues raised:

  • I think that running under Apache will remove a big barrier that currently prevents people even looking at OpenACS. Your average CIO and developers will immediately ignore OACS because it is too non-standard. Running under Apache makes it seem a lot more familiar. Anyone who thinks this is not true has not met any average CIOs or developers lately.
  • If an organisation commits to OpenACS however, it won't be long before they switch to AOLServer. But the Apache support was worth the effort because otherwise they would not use the product.
  • I currently develop very intensive OO and templated Perl code that runs under mod_perl/Apache. I have written code that interacts with Apache in much more complex ways than appears to be average in the mod_perl community. Given that, di I think Apache is more flexible etc. than AOLServer? No way. In fact our team is seriously considering writing the server daemon in Perl itself because there are no ways around some core issues that we have without writing C code. I wish AOLServer was an option, but there is no way we would get permission to use it in our customer production environment. Another team, however, got the go-ahead to deploy Tomcat under Apache. Anyone who has administered Tomcat knows how much that sucks, but it sounds ok to the people making decisions because it's Java, and it comes from the Apache foundation so it must be good.

Look at Postgres vs. MySQL - if you don'at least _appear_ to support the platforms people want, you will lose to an inferior competitor every time.

Selling TCL is hard enough these days (not even Vignette can get away with that any more) - Apache support would really help with marketing.

I also think it's a bit of a low hanging fruit too - compare it to re-coding OpenACS in OO Tcl or in Ruby...

Not sure I added any value there - sorry to waste your reading time ;)