Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to nsjava staus
Bit surprised to hear you say that, and I thought I might respond to a couple of points.
1) Bugs are likely to be fixed more quickly
Urm... I don't think there's much evidence for that.In fact you might argue that the larger a community, the more difficult its is to get certain changes/fixes in. And, given the larger number of people and usage, it may make some fixes inappropriate, even if you need them desparately. Secondly, surely its more to do with the actual number of bugs! In my experience, AOLServer has been much more reliable than many of the alternatives, and therefore the actual bug fixing requirements are smaller. Perhaps this is a benefit of the fact that AOLServer is essentially maintained by commercial interests. I could argue this leads to higher quality and less bleeding edge, buggy code.....
2) We're likely to get access to things like DAV, SOAP, and whatever the next cool technology is going to be.
Again, there is some truth to this, but I *really* don't see what the problem is. SOAP is just not that complicated! I think the reason its not yet been implemented is that no-one has a burning need for it. If we'd *ever* come across a customer who wanted it, we'd have built it!... I do take your point, but I don't agree its all that critical
3) It might make it easier to run OpenACS alongside some other technology, something that I believe people will want.
Urm.. which tecnologies? It quite happily runs alongside most of the things I can think of
4) Running under Windows
Exactly who is this requirement for? Firstly the OpenACS is an excellent architecture for runing websites that don't go down. If someone is dumb enough to run it on windows, then they are obviously not all that interested in reliability/performance. Also there are many good alternative for windows.. Why bother with yet anouther one? The rest of the World is moving to Linux (my God even Deutsche Bank are moving their entire infrastructure to it)... and I personally think the pressure for Windows Server based web stuff will diminish. And against the effort of porting it... who's actually going to end up using it?
5) Easier installation, because people are likely to have Apache running already.
Apache is more difficult to install. Because you oftend end up having to bolt on many extenmsions and configuration items its doubly troublsome.. I really can't think how on earth you can make AOLServer installationb much simpler... I mean we're talking about a webserver/application server here... its not Notepad. I don't think a quick compile and a single config file are *really* all that difficult.
And I also notice you avoiding mentioning all the major *advantages* of AOLServer that we'd essentially lose!
I understand what your getting at, but dropping AOLServer is not the solution. The better solution is to make AOLServer compete!.
Plus... and this is the really worrying thing.... if this community were to ditch AOLServer, become equally windows focussed (with all the concessions that brings), I, my company and I daresay many others would abandon the community like rats off a ship! We'd just end up taking a cut, forking the code base and continuing on...
Trying to make OpenACS a panacea for everyone, for all things is a mistake. We'd be better of focussing of the what it does really well, and leveraging that to give it an advantage over the alternatives..
After all, some want Ford Prefects, some want Ferraries and some just want skateboards.... If we tried to turn our Ferrari into a Station Wagon with a Turbo... we'll get exactly what we deserve ;)
Cheers Simon
