Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Thoughts on CCM

As far as CCM goes, the @author tags are only a partial measure of who contributed to CCM because:

1. Typically, the @author tag is only used by the initial creator of the file, even if the file is only just a stub. Most of us don't bother to update or add to the @author tag as we add code.
2. There are a lot of steps in software development other than implementation: requirements, design, testing, and so forth. Contributors to those steps are generally not reflected in the @author tag. Virtually all of the systems have been designed by teams of people and implementation handed off to a member of the design team.

So, don't worry if you see just a few names in the @author tags and you don't recognize a lot of the current names. Rafael, for instance, conceived and designed the entire ACS 4 object and permissions systems, the CCM persistence layer, among other things. Jim is our resident XSLT guru and was a key member of the initial presentation team. Archit and I wrote the ACS 4 security subsystem, tuned the request processor with Rafael, and helped design the presentation system, login system, and other parts of CCM. I won't bore you by giving the biographies of every individual in engineering, but all of us have been working on the web development problems for several years now.

Peter and Jun bring up an interesting point about complexity. There is general agreement (and I agree) that CCM is substantially more complex than its predecessors. This complexity is an issue we struggle with every day: how to build a powerful system without presenting a lot of that complexity to the user/developer. IIRC, when we released ACS 4, with a unified object/permissions system, a lot of people had issues with the complexity of ACS 4 as well as the lack of feature breadth (where are all the ACS 3 modules was a common question). We haven't been very good about hiding complexity in the past, but we're working on trying to make things easier to use, and hopefully we will be able to work together with the community.

Regarding community, I hear you. We're going to work as hard as we can to launch ccm.redhat.com this week in beta for everyone. If it looks like we're not going to be able to launch a Beta this week, then I'll set up a mailing list.

On an unrelated note, PG hackers might be interested that we've uncovered a number of unorthodox behaviors in PG that have been fixed on the tip of the PG CVS tree (mostly related to warning messages and inconsistencies between the published API and implementation). We've also been talking to the RHDB team about CONNECT BY (we're encouraging them to implement something like DB2's recursive queries, but the end result is that we're hoping that by 7.3 PG will have a solution for tree queries).