Over breakfast this morning I had a long chat with my friend Mark about Webcrossing and how it compares to OACS. From this I gather that there is lots to dislike about Webcrossing. For one it's pretty much proprietary everything right down to the server side scripting language used to customize the software. It is Javascript for the most part, so Mark was able to pretty much slide in to development quickly which is a positive, but still had to ovecome a bit of a learning curve after being hired for the project. They also provide a templating language. The database is also proprietary and supposedly optimized for the web as is the web server. You can interact with an external db via an ODBC wrapper API, provided you pay for that configuration. Second - Mark tells me that as far as he can see, there is no way to build modules or plugins as Webcrossing calls them. You are stuck with what the company chooses to provide.
I guess they try to compensate for this by facilitating extensive customization of existing modules via their scripting facilities. The modules are chock-full of features - usually much more than anyone application will likely ever use. He says that like anything new, at first it was interesting but overall he tells me is looking forward to moving on to something else non Webcrossing related - he says his experience with WC has been very mixed but overall he feels quite restricted due to the nature of the platform.
Anyway, just thought the community might be interested in hearing an opinion about a competing product from someone who is in the trenches working with it.
