When I sell the OpenACS, I spend most of my time extolling the virtues of AOLserver. The reason is that it I can point to the fact that the largest ISP in the world uses it, that my developers love building tools with it and that it *works*. I also find that I can put together a very easy sales pitch around it, which I shared in another thread (and plan on writing up more formally for the community).
That being said, I think John and Michael C's ideas are good for a few reasons, partly because I have been speaking with John a lot about it offline so I understand his needs better but also because I think it will be a very useful experience even if the tool isn't all that's cracked up to be.
They are both long time members of the community and contributors. Michael's been around since the beginning and even turned Roberto on to the ACS. John has contributed the VMware install and has worked extensively with the workflow package. He will be contributing a paper on his work eventually and also a package for document peer review.
What I think that John is looking for, and I think that some other users and potential users may appreciate, is using the datamodel and code that is present in the oacs within the context of legacy systems or new applications where the platform has been specified even *prior* to the application specifications have been written down.
Now, I agree with Simon that this is the worst case and it's reasonable to reject those clients out of hand. But it's also reasonable to accept them if they are willing to pay you full cost for the death march :)
John's initial suggestion may have been a bit too harsh, but I think that probably everyone has thought at one point or another that it life would be easier if we were using Apache rather than AOLserver, if only from a marketing perspective.
I also think that John's idea of a tool that works but is not the canonical tool is a good one. Some people might use the nstcl stuff with apache or IIS, realize that they are only getting 20% of the functionality and administrative ease of AOLserver and will be interested in switching. This could bring in much new blood to the community.
So I think that this project is very worthwhile, but I do agree with Don that it should remain peripheral to the core community at least until it proves that it will have support. If John and Michael build the tool, it works *and* they or others maintain and support it, then it can become a piece of the canonical distribution. Until then, we should consider it valuable and worthwhile community R&D.
talli
