Forum OpenACS Q&A: New packages / Site organization

Posted by William Byrne on 08/20/02 09:36 AM

Hello,

I'm new to the OpenACS community and I am psyched about the
potential it offers. I'm somewhat a veteran of Tcl (provided DnD Tcl
components for Delphi at http://tslc.sourceforge.net ) and have
reasonable degree of faith in the combined
OpenACS/AOLServer/PostgreSQL technology.

I think it's safe to say that being a software engineer I'm
conditioned to searching high and low for engineering solutions that
fit the need of the day. Unfortunately, the discovery process often
extends beyond the period of a dog's life<g>. In the context of
OpenACS, I was hoping to arrive at a repository of wicked cool
packages that I could incorporate into web based business solutions.
I'm not finding too much either on the site or searching Yahoo and
Deja. Perhaps I don't know what to look for. That said, I'm rolling
through the ecommerce package and I'm impressed with its features.

I have the following questions. Is there a pretty page of package
descriptions that I can peruse? If not, are there plans to do so? Am
I out of place in suggesting the OpenACS web site is a tad
disjointed? (OpenACS has a "designed by an engineer" look-n-feel. I'm
guilty of the same.) Furthermore, will RedHat commandeer the ACS
roots and would it be better to look there instead of OpenACS?

Grateful for Open Source and the generosity of it's authors,
William Byrne

2: Response to New packages / Site organization (response to 1)

Posted by Jun Yamog on 08/20/02 10:08 AM

Hi William,

Welcome to OpenACS.

#1. I assume that have OpenACS 4.5 already installed since you are already trying out e-commerce. You can go to http://youroacs/doc and read the other installed packages there. You can also grab this yucky patch https://openacs.org/sdm/one-baf.tcl?baf_id=1602 so you can read the uninstalled packages too. You can start with ACS templating.

#2. Nope Red Hat will not bother OpenACS. The short history of OpenACS 4 (not including ver 3). Is that Arsdigita (now acquired by Red Hat) stopped the development of the Tcl version. OpenACS community picked it up and made it better. Hence OpenACS is the only Tcl child of ACS. CCM is the Java child of ACS. Red Hat is only doing CCM. Since you are a Tcl nerd it is best to start with OpenACS, CCM is also ok if you come from a Java background. Therefore OpenACS is the best place to be if you are developer of OpenACS and ACS.

We hope you will enjoy your stay with the community.

3: Response to New packages / Site organization (response to 1)

Posted by defunct defunct on 08/20/02 11:53 AM

Also, there is general agreement that the site needs a big overhaul, and that process is continuing as we speak.. :)

4: Response to New packages / Site organization (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 08/20/02 03:54 PM

You can check out the way the download repository on the new site might be organized. This is just an example with a tarball of the whole thing along with tarballs of a few of the packages, obviously the structure needs to be fleshed out before we switch to the new site.

I'd like to add a download repository for user contributions, too.

The repository itself is an OpenACS 4 package called, appropriately enough, the "download" package.

5: Response to New packages / Site organization (response to 1)

Posted by Roberto Mello on 08/20/02 04:02 PM

William,

Take a look at http://dev.openacs.org/about/what-is-openacs. It has a link to http://dev.openacs.org/packages/package-list which is a list of the packages available on that instance of OpenACS (almost all of the packages in CVS right now).

Welcome to the community. The bboards here are a friendly place to ask questions, so don't be shy. Our not-so-great documentation (available in your OpenACS instance at /doc) should be of great help too.