OpenACS.org News

European OpenACS and Tcl/Tk Conference, Vienna 2023

Mon, 01 May 2023 15:59:52 GMT

We are proud to announce the joint European OpenACS and Tcl Conference. This event will combine the 7th OpenACS conference and the 19th European Tcl/Tk Users Meeting (EuroTcl).

   Date: July 20th and 21st, 2022
   Location: Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU), Austria
   Venue: Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna
   Contact: conference2023@openacs.org

The joint conference seeks practitioners, developers, and researchers whose work involves Tcl/Tk and/ or OpenACS. The conference will offer multiple presentations and discussions about Tcl/Tk programming, as well as for developments and applications of the OpenACS Web application framework. You are invited to contribute and participate actively by proposing a presentation.

For details and registration, visit: https://openacs.org/conf2023/

OpenACS 5.10.0 final released

Sun, 16 Oct 2022 09:04:43 GMT

We are proud to announce the release of the OpenACS 5.10.0 [1]. This release contains the most changes in OpenACS between releases in history, including many security and performance improvements, and includes new functionalities. This new release differs from OpenACS 5.9.1 by the following statistics

3445 files changed, 215464 insertions(+), 193642 deletions(-)

The release of OpenACS 5.10.0 contains the 93 packages of the oacs-5-10 branch (plus 9 compared to oacs-5-9). These packages include the OpenACS core packages, the major application packages (e.g. most the ones used on OpenACS.org), and DotLRN 2.10.0. The release contains several security improvements and new functions, several new packages were added, and 370 bugs noted in the bug tracker have been fixed (plus many more not noted there).

For a partial summary of changes, please check the release notes [2], for the more detailed list of changes since the release of OpenACS 5.9.1, see [3]. Many changes/enhancements of the application packages are just contained in the detailed changelog.

These changes were contributed by 7 committers ...

Antonio Pisano
Gustaf Neumann
Günter Ernst
Hector Romojaro
Michael Aram
Stefan Sobernig
Thomas Renner

... and additional 13 patch/bugfix providers

Felix Mödritscher
Florian Mosböck
Frank Bergmann
Franz Penz
Hanifa Hasan
Keith Paskett
Markus Moser
Maurizio Martignano
Monika Andergassen
Nathan Coulter
Rainer Bachleitner
Stephan Adelsberger
Tony Kirkham

All packages of the release were tested with PostgreSQL 13.* and Tcl 8.6.*.

[1] https://openacs.org/projects/openacs/download/
[2] https://openacs.org/doc/release-notes
[3] https://openacs.org/changelogs/ChangeLog-5.10.0

European OpenACS and Tcl Conference, Vienna 2022

Tue, 17 May 2022 11:13:11 GMT

We are proud to announce the joint European OpenACS and Tcl Conference. This event will combine the 6th OpenACS conference and the 18th European Tcl/Tk Users Meeting (EuroTcl).

   Date: June 30th and July 1st, 2022
   Location: Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU), Austria
   Venue: Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna
   Contact: conference2022@openacs.org

For details and registration, visit: https://openacs.org/conf2022/

Downtime due to hardware upgrade

Tue, 02 Feb 2021 14:39:04 GMT

OpenACS.org will be down on Feb 4, from 8am to about 12am MET (Vienna) due to migration to a new hardware

OpenACS 5.9.1 final released

Sat, 10 Oct 2020 08:38:59 GMT

We are proud to announce the release of OpenACS 5.9.1.

This release contains many security and performance improvements and includes new functionalities. The release of OpenACS 5.9.1 contains the 88 packages of the oacs-5-9 branch. These packages include the OpenACS core packages, the major application packages (e.g. most the ones used on OpenACS.org), and DotLRN 2.9.1.

Refactoring of rich-text editor integration
Improved admin interface (e.g. theme manager), improved scalability for large sites
Improvements for "host-node mapped" subsites, acs-rels, status code handlers for AJAX, Internationalization, and documentation.

Altogether, OpenACS 5.9.1 differs from OpenACS 5.9.0 in about 312710 line insertions and 103273 deletions, contributed by 5 committers and 8 additional bug-fix submitters. All packages of the release were tested with PostgreSQL 9.6.* and Tcl 8.5.*.

Many thanks to all who helped in this effort via direct contributions, bug-reports or testing!

Release Announcement, ChangeLog, Download core, Download full

Boston Bug Bashing Blowout! Jan 23 to 25

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 16:57:35 GMT

Where: MIT
Why: Its the weekend after Linux World in NYC, plan your travel now!
What: Food, Fun, Wireless, Bugs

More info: contact Caroline@meekshome.com

.LRN 2.5.0 has been released

Fri, 16 Mar 2018 14:56:35 GMT

.LRN 2.5.0 has been released and is available for download from the repository.

System and Hardware upgrade

Mon, 08 Jan 2018 17:52:51 GMT

Dear Users of openacs.org. Due to upgrade work, expect down-times of openacs.org between Dec 27 and Dec 30.

OpenACS 5.9.0 final released

Sun, 10 Dec 2017 14:37:55 GMT

We are proud to announce the release of OpenACS 5.9.0.
This release contains many security and performance improvements as well as new functionality. The new release differs from OpenACS 5.8.1 in the following points:

PostgreSQL enhancements and cleanups to improve performance and maintainability of the basic data model
Greatly improved HTML validity and protection against XSS attacks.
Improved theming support to create responsive interfaces.
Various new functionalities to ease debugging and to improve performance.

Altogether, OpenACS 5.9.0 differs from OpenACS 5.8.1 in more than 100,000 modifications contributed by 4 committers. All packages of the release were tested with PostgreSQL 9.4.* and Tcl 8.5.*.

Many thanks to all who helped in this effort via direct contributions, bug-reports or testing!

Release Announcement, ChangeLog, Download

System outage

Fri, 27 Oct 2017 08:23:56 GMT

Today, the campus-wide infrastructure suffered from a networking incident, that cause unavailability between 7:30 am and 10 am MEZ. This affected as well openacs.org. We apologize.

Chat Module ported to PostgreSQL

Mon, 31 Jul 2017 08:43:24 GMT

Rodrigo Proenca's Chat module port for PostgreSQL can be downloaded from the file storage. See also http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=86518 for more information.

(Submitted by Felipe Gelbcke Gubert)

Updated OpenACS/DotLRN installer for Windows

Sun, 30 Jul 2017 11:41:16 GMT

Galileo University presents a new OpenACS/DotLRN installer for Windows, available in:

http://openacs.org/storage/index?folder_id=344943

The installer is for people who wish to try / test OpenACS and dotLRN systems in a fast way under the windows platform. (As well as tool for demonstrators in the e-lane project)

The source code will be available for any interested user, as well as further updated versions of the installer will continue, plus more improvements.

More info here: http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=349832

Upgrade to PostgreSQL 9.6 and Downtime

Fri, 16 Jun 2017 15:43:33 GMT

OpenACS is now upgraded to PostgreSQL 9.6. Due to a hardware problem with a RAID controller there will be a scheduled downtime on Monday, June 19th from 6:50 to about 8:00 CEST (middle European Time)

New XML-RPC server for AOLserver & OpenACS

Fri, 12 May 2017 07:22:36 GMT

The Code Mill releases a fast, light weight XML-RPC server for AOLserver. The XML-RPC-server can be installed stand alone w/ AOLserver for a minimal footprint. Or in conjunction w/ OpenACS to add an XML-RPC server to a full blow web application.

This XML-RPC server was created for Praesagus, Inc as a light weight method to make remote procedure calls.

Boost your application performance to serve large files!

Fri, 12 May 2017 06:50:31 GMT

Gustaf: For handling the file-deliveries, i would recommend the background file delivery based on libthread, which does not block connection threads.

We use this in production since more than one year. For example today (no semester yet) we had so far 150.000 file deliveries.

The asynchrounous background delivery requires a small patch (2 changes, one is a backport from naviserver) and the tcl thread library (by zoran). The application code is in XOTcl is only a few lines of code and is included in xotcl-core (bgdelivery-procs.tcl).

One needs the following patch to aolserver 4.0.10
http://media.wu-wien.ac.at/download/aolserver-nsd-conn.patch

with this patch and xotcl-core, you can replace

ns_returnfile 200 $mime_type $filename

ad_returnfile_background 200 $mime_type $filename

e.g. in cr_write_content in acs-content-repository/tcl/revision-procs.tcl
to activate it and to deliver files from the content-repository (file-store) in the background.

The connection thread is only used for permission management, localization of the file and writing the the reply header, the actual delivery of the file is performed via asychronous io without using up many resources. This can handle probably a couple of thousand concurrent file deliveries without running out of resources.

Original thread:
http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=482221
Wiki:
http://openacs.org/xowiki/Boost_your_application_performance_to_serve_large_files