Alfred, I have taken the ACS 4.2 database API, ad_page_contract, and
various other useful Tcl things and made them work stand-alone in
AOLserver. (For the purposes of this discussion, ACS 4.2 and OpenACS
4.6 should be pretty much the same.) Doing so wasn't all that hard,
but it definitely wasn't trivial. For example, I remember having to
make a few silly subtle little tweaks (ifdef'd for with ACS
vs. without) which my testing showed were necessary, but which I never
really did understand why.
I could send you an old tarball of that code if you want. However,
it's old ACS 4.2 stuff, and somewhat hackish. I have not yet tried
doing the same with recent OpenACS code, but based on my past
experience I'm sure it could be made to work. (On snafu might be
dealing with the query dispatcher, however.)
At any rate, I too would like to see the current OpenACS Tcl code be
refactored for easy, drop-in use in non-OpenACS AOLserver
environments, but so far I haven't done anything about it. It's
rather far down on my personal list of priorities, currently. But
definitely worth doing.
