Forum OpenACS Q&A: How to covert an existing web to OpenACS?

1: How to covert an existing web to OpenACS?

Posted by Winny Zhang on 12/14/05 10:58 PM

My department has one info web and one email web for a project posted on the web. We were thinking change to OpenACS. I am exploring the possibilities.

The info web and email web both were written in ColdFusion. One connects to SQL DB and the other to Access. If I want to convert them to OpenACS, do I need rewrite all codes? Or there is a simply way to do it?

Thanks

Winny

2: Re: How to covert an existing web to OpenACS? (response to 1)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 12/15/05 09:37 AM

I would say you need to wager the costs of copy pasting the code from ColdFusion and email web into OpenACS vs. the costs of writing an import script. But you should be able to write import scripts nevertheless.

As for the code, if you talk about sourcecode, OpenACS will look different. But this might be one of the reasons you wanted to switch, so I'd stay with the sourcecode as long as there is no compelling need to rewrite parts of it.

Hope this helps you along, looking forward to see you in the OpenACS Community

3: Re: How to covert an existing web to OpenACS? (response to 1)

Posted by Jade Rubick on 12/15/05 04:23 PM

Converting from Cold Fusion could be pretty easy. You could duplicate the Colf Fusion markup in the OpenACS templating system fairly easily I believe. I think I saw something about this on the Aolserver mailing list once... Dossy posted about it..

4: Re: How to covert an existing web to OpenACS? (response to 1)

Posted by Alex Kroman on 12/15/05 06:08 PM

Hi Winny,

It really depends on how complicated your current system is. I have worked on converting ColdFusion systems to PHP content management systems before. In my experience the most cost effective way to do this is to rewrite your code from scratch.

Although Jade is right, you could probably write a coldfusion interpreter in the OpenACS templating language, I think that Coldfusion is significantly complicated that this would be more expensive then writing your program from scratch.

Thanks,
Alex

5: Re: How to covert an existing web to OpenACS? (response to 1)

Posted by Winny Zhang on 12/15/05 06:54 PM

Thanks for Malte, Jade and Alex's suggestions.

The problem here is the info web was done by an outside contractor in Cold Fusion and connected to SQL server 2000. I don't think the current system is complicated. However, I am familiar with SQL server and html, but knew nothing about Cold Fusion.

The server I have for OpenACS has Windows 2000 (could be upgraded to 2003)installed.

Could anyone give me more info about the OpenACS templating system and if I need to know Cold Fusion before I can do anything?

Thanks so much.

Winny

6: Re: How to covert an existing web to OpenACS? (response to 1)

Posted by Alex Kroman on 12/15/05 07:36 PM

Winny,

I would suggest just trying to install OpenACS on a spare server and poking around a bit. You could try installing the project-manager application which might do a lot of the same things your coldfusion system did.