Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Res: Will Dr. OpenACS survive? Or why I stopped worrying and learned to love the .LRN consortium?

Hi,

I've got stucked reading those debates about the language to choose for openACS. I think those debates are worthless. Lets see why.

Lets go back to the begining (long ago) and remember:

TCL is not your friend
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Do NOT try to do fancy stuff in Tcl and if you do, if it doesn't work quickly, you might want to DROP IT. Don't be stubborn with Tcl. It is not worth it, especially if you are just beginning to learn how to work with it. The language is fairly simple, and most of the power of OpenACS comes from the API, not the programming language."

The database is your friend
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Both Oracle and Postgres are supported by OpenACS, and they both are very good databases.

Yes, SQL and Oracle (now PostgreSQL too) can be challenging to get to know. It can be frustrating to realize that you can do whatever you want to do in 3-10 lines of code, but that it'll take you a while to figure out what those few lines need to be. But once you do, you'll be able to do lots of the stuff you want to do using the database. Given how powerful an RDBMS like Oracle or PostgreSQL is, you can, and should, do as much as you can in the database. Be creative in coming up with queries that can get as much stuff out at once as you can, so you don't need to do multiple queries (use nested queries, joins, etc.) The database is fast and powerful compared to Tcl (or ANY OTHER LANGUAGE between the database and the Web server). Use that to your advantage.

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The funniest thing is that all of this information belongs to our own pages: https://openacs.org/education/psets/advice

How can we go forward if we do not even know our own history and documentation?.

Félix.

Félix, you are mistaken in thinking that we are debating what language to choose for OpenACS. No, we are just discussing random stuff, stuff which might, maybe, end up having something useful to do with how to make OpenACS better. (Or might not.) That's it, really.

However, you are probably wise to point us back to our officially documented advice on such issues. :)