Forum OpenACS Development: ETP for ACS vs. Manila

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1: ETP for ACS vs. Manila
Posted by Roger Williams on 11/24/01 05:03 PM
I was looking thru some stuff at weblogs.com and a couple of sites went to xxxx.editthispage.com (where xxxx=various servers). When I tried www.editthispage.com it took me to this page describing the Manila system which touts Manila as a full-featured content management system. So I would like a succinct answer to the question:

What does ETP running on top of ACS provide that Manila does not out- of-the-box (other than the fact that Manila is $899)?

The top 3 functions to this question will be sufficient for me.

TIA.

Regards..

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2: Response to ETP for ACS vs. Manila (response to 1)
Posted by John Sequeira on 11/24/01 08:10 PM
Here's a brief comparison:

Out of the box,  Manila lets you build certain types of sites easily,  but not all types of site.  I was using it on my resume web site,  but I ran into many problems with static rendering (FTP export) and gave up and switched to Front Page (ugh).  ETP has no concept of static rendering - all the pages are dynamic.  That's probably the biggest difference from an out of box perspective: Manila works with cheap hosting resources via FTP,  ETP requires you to install and maintain the full OpenACS stack.  Manila server, OTOH, has the same requirements -  a server.

Manila's templating system doesn't require you to have file-system access to the server,  ETP's does.

Another minor issue:  Manila has no concept of versioning - ETP distinguishes between 'live' revisions and prior revisions.  In manila,  everything just gets served out of the object database.

Both toolkits allow you to quickly get a site into production built by a team of users.  ETP provides much more of a foundation to go beyond that simple application.  Manila starts and stops at it's out of the box experience.  I really enjoy working with Frontier,  and in theory you can customize it,  but in practice the paradigm is tough to grok,  and the dev tools are nonexistent.

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3: Response to ETP for ACS vs. Manila (response to 1)
Posted by Patrick Giagnocavo on 11/25/01 07:36 AM
I have the most experience with Frontier v5.0, which is the last free version of UserLand's software.  Frontier is the precursor to Manila.

Basically, Manila is based on a home-grown language that I would describe as not particularly strong, but it has a big library of verbs (in TCL we call these procs) many of which are designed for HTML generation and the like.

It has some nice features, but it is limited for a number of reasons:

1.  no Unix version

2.  Mac and Windows versions not particularly robust

3.  it uses its own "object database", which is both the source of its nice features and its greatest curse, since it is not that good a database

4.  Something, somewhere, leaks memory.

5.  Dave Winer is a nutjob.

OK, some things that OpenACS does better than Manila:

1.  Reliability - runs on unix-like OSes

2.  Real DBMS access

3.  Easier to extend templating system - TCL is much easier to understand than Dave's eccentric homebrew language, which combines elements of HyperTalk, Pascal, C, and AppleScript

4.  Easier to back up

5.  Offers versioning support

6.  More robust user handling (for cases where multiple users are updating content)

Manila is, however, much easier to get going.