I just had a discussion with an experienced PHP developer that I converted to OpenACS. He mentioned what is irritating is the fact that you have to deal with three files for one page and that variables are automatically set in each of them, without an explanation.
Example:
- If you call db_* you do not know which variables are returned in the tcl statement. So if you are searching for the variable you have not much of a clue, unless you look into the .xql file(s). So extending db_* calls with a documentation part that allows us to write which variables are expected to be returned could help
- This is especially true if you enter the variable in the .adp file without even calling it in .tcl.
But I agree with Rocael's assessment, we should not try to target the same group of people that PHP is targeting, for this OpenACS is just too complex as a framework.
One note though on XoTCL. Before we move forward in this direction, we definitely need training materials which describe common tasks as done before and how they are done afterwards, so we do not loose the experienced developers that OpenACS has at the moment. And obviously we should stay backwards compatible, so the old style of development still works.
