Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to nsjava staus

For me, the main issue is dilution of resource. My guess is that John's not willing to work with the existing technical envelope anyway, so any effort he puts into mod_nsd is not going to keep us from solving real problems anyway, because he won't work on them regardless. So, John, go for it. I just don't want anyone doing useful work getting diverted from the very serious technical issues we need to solve over the next several months if we're going to succeed.

But when I read things like this ...

[ Aside: Does anyone not want the ability to deploy your application at a plain-vanilla ISP? ]

I don't see an argument for pseudo-nsd

I see an argument for rewriting OpenACS as a LAMP application. Simon hints at the difficulty above, i.e. when it comes to running OpenACS at a plain-vanilla ISP, AOLserver is not your only problem. How many plain-vanilla ISPs offer Oracle for $19.95/month? Most only offer MySQL (I personally would shun any ISP that forces me to use Windows as the platform). Your plea to migrate from AOLserver will be followed soon by one to support MySQL if you follow your argument to its logical conclusion, because most ISPs won't run PostgreSQL. At most you're going to be given a choice between LAMP or 2K/IIS/MSSQL or perhaps 2K/Apache/MSSQL.

I co-lo my own box for $100/month and have full control over it at my vanilla ISP. That's starting to look overpriced, Cathy Sarisky is offering hosting on a remote box that costs her about the same but which includes rebooting and other low-level service. And she didn't have to buy her own box like I did.

If I have a client that can't afford that kind of solution, I know they can't afford me. So, frankly, no ... I personally don't care

And I don't see why anyone would.

Let me give you an example that might help out. I've written my last few big projects in perl because it ran where I needed it to and it talked to the db's I needed to talk to and it was quick to develop in.

In other words OpenACS would've brought you no advantage even if it were written in Perl and supported whatever platform you were interfacing to.

OpenACS is not and never will become a panacea for every web job out there. The push towards vertical apps like dotLRN is in fact a push away from the vision of being all things to all people. We've been focusing effort on making OpenACS a great platform for developing applications like dotLRN.

The great interest that dotLRN is triggering tells me that this focus is one that might play well in the marketplace.

Meanwhile, what message is made if we implement mod_nsd or some other hack to get rid of AOLserver.

Even the OpenACS people realize AOLserver sucks, because they're trying to abandon it for Apache?

That's not a great message to bring to the world when any stable alternative is months away at minimum. It also opens the door for competitors to say "they were wrong about AOLserver, they're wrong about Tcl and PostgreSQL, too".

Really ... if we're going to abandon rock-solid, easy-to-install technology like AOLserver, why not just go the whole nine yards and rewrite everything as a LAMP application? We'd be immediately far more popular than we are today. If ultimate popularity, not technical excellence, is our goal, why not just choose the most popular platform out there and run with it?