This is another classic case of AD not following their own guidelines.
One of the main advantages of the 4.x (tcl) branch was packages. This meant that if someone implemented a cool package, you could just make it a dependency and be guaranteed that its methods would be used.
Of course in reality, everyone wrote their own thing and it looks as bad as ACS 3.x from a proc point of view. Remember how many functions that did the exact same thing there was in 3.x? Some 4.x examples:
- acs-references and places
- general comments and home brewed per package
- acs-messeges et. al.
- acs-datetime and home brewed
- news, cms-news
You get the idea. It will be much harder to keep this straight in the OpenACS realm as there is really no central god to stop me (or you)from doing whatever you want and reinventing the wheel.
Personally, I think that some other services need to be added to the core and one of the hopes I have for the documentation team is some central location of all procs/plsql of all publicly available packages on the OpenACS site. That way if I am going to write a package that needs some functionallity I can see if someone else already wrote it (being the lazy programmer I am). If it isn't written maybe there is something I can sub-class and use with a dependency.
(Note to myself...) I need to write about the evolution of acs-event, events, calendar and etc. This was talked about for a long time at the LA office and since (I believe) I am the only one left from those discussions still using ACS, it could be a valuable lesson in general purpose services built for open ended superclasses. Although its real intent was for events and calendar, acs-events should have the capability to deal with any similar problem (including room reservation, which has been mentioned in other threads).
One of the main reasons I still use ACS is this promise of reusablity. There really aren't any other systems that do the same thing, and now that the OpenACS community has gotten its collective hands around it, it is even better than it would have been as AD's ugly step-daughter (we all know that the java version emits much better html 😉 ).
