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Web development with OpenACS

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I think all the candidates for the OCT are excellent candidates.

I've been developing on ACS and OpenACS full-time for 4 years, on both Oracle and Postgres. I'm author of the Project Manager (currently 23K lines of code) and Resource List packages , and the current maintainer of Logger, Organizations, Postcard, and Room Reservations packages.

I'm a documentation maniac, and a strong advocate for usable, effective designs. My background is in Human Computer Interaction.

As to the OpenACS community, I've compiled a document which lists our strengths, but I think we need to work on these areas:

• We have too many barriers in place that keep people from adopting OpenACS. The installation process is difficult, which probably turns off about 97% of the people that would try out OpenACS otherwise, and to be frank, we generally suck at marketing. We generally fall into a common trap of technologists: ''Our techology rocks, but nobody else is cool enough to realize it''. So I think our focus should be on growing the community, and in order to do that, we need to make it easy for people to get involved. Using Arch is another thing I'd like to eventually push us towards, once we can find a suitable CVS - Arch gateway. This will allow any developer to publish changes even without commit access, and improve our distributed development. However, I think when we do change things, the process to do so must be well-documented.

• I think we need to work more on the end-user experience.

• I also think flawless upgrades are a very important goal to work towards.

• We have a very powerful API, but we also make it hard to get started as a developer. There are also a lot of ways we could make development easier. I think Matthew's Attrribute Management System (AMS) is a great improvement, and I'm very inspired by the Jotspot demos. I'm very impressed with the direction Lars has been moving us. Ideally, it should be really easy to create simple applications.

If I'm elected to the OCT, I aspire to be a clone of Joel, who I think has done a tremendous amount to move OpenACS forward the last few years.

I hope to help solidify and communicate the process OpenACS will take as it moves forward. I also hope to better communicate between the OCT and the community at large (although I think they're doing a pretty decent job).

Besides my technical background, I am the president of a national (and working on international) non-profit organization.

I've moved these to: http://openacs.org/faq/one-faq?faq_id=122349

Tuning Guide

New loop control constructs

From Nathan Folkman at AOL:

In AOLserver 4.5 the following new Tcl APIs are provided:

"ns_for"
"ns_foreach"
"ns_while"
"ns_loop_ctl"

The new AOLserver 4.5 APIs require you to use the new commands explicitly.

Here's a quick example:

server1:nscp 4> ns_thread begindetached "while 1 {ns_sleep 1:0}"

server1:nscp 5> ns_loop_ctl list

server1:nscp 6> ns_thread begindetached "ns_while 1 {ns_sleep 1:0}"

server1:nscp 7> ns_loop_ctl list
0

server1:nscp 8> ns_loop_ctl info 0
0 41973248 1149519792:592471 9 running {ns_while 1 {ns_sleep 1:0}}

server1:nscp 9> ns_loop_ctl pause 0
1

server1:nscp 10> ns_loop_ctl resume 0
1

server1:nscp 11> ns_loop_ctl cancel 0
1

server1:nscp 12> ns_loop_ctl list

If you want to gather statistics about existing "for", "foreach", and
"while" loops, simply rename those commands and have them instead point
to the new commands:

for -> ns_for
foreach -> ns_foreach
while -> while

Hope that helps!

Howto test ns_httpsget to another server

Create a test page test.tcl at the server's main directory (for openacs, usually something like service0/www). Insert the following into the file:

set outbound_https_url "https://anotherservertesturl"
ns_return 200 text/plain [ns_httpsget $outbound_https_url]

Then browse to the url of the test page, for example:

http://yourdomain.com/test

You can leave off ".tcl" and ".adp" suffixes when requesting .adp/.tcl file pairs. You can use this example to test other ns_command behavior too.

---

Finding help on Aolserver

List archives: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.aolserver
Search page: http://search.gmane.org/search.php?group=gmane.comp.web.aolserver&sort=relevance
Google http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aarticle.gmane.org+gmane.comp.web.aolserver

For Postgres, these are the steps to take to recover you database from backup.

• Stop Aolserver (svc -d /service/service0 usually does it)
• dropdb service0
• createdb -E UNICODE service0
• psql -f mydb.dmp service0
• Bring Aolserver back up (svc -u /service/service0)

I think you might also need to copy the content-repository directory files. They might not be backed up with just the db backup. It depends on whether you have your content repository set to save to the filesystem or database.

If your service0 name is different than the dumped file, you can use Perl to update the service0 name

In crontab:

35 12 * * * tar -cf /web/safe4all/safe4all-cr-files.tar /web/safe4all/content-repository-content-files/ ; gzip /web/safe4all/safe4all-cr-files.tar
0 5 * * * /usr/bin/sftp -b /web/safe4all/database-backup/sftp-batchfile backupuser@ipaddress

See a page which describes setting up password-less ssh authentication

sftp-batchfile:

cd /home/backupuser
put /web/safe4all/database-backup/safe4all_*.dmp
put /web/safe4all/safe4all-cr-files.tar.gz

Troubleshooting

Getting weird invalid command \N errors when you try to restore? http://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=148479