Weblog Page

for beginning developers

Created by OpenACS community, last modified by Antonio Pisano 03 Nov 2023, at 11:55 AM

Tutorials for OpenACS development

• Learn the pieces gradually and learn to read the docs so you can eventually Become Expert in the basics!
• Paper: OpenACS: robust web development framework (PDF)
• OpenACS Development Tutorial
• Emacs as an OpenACS IDE
• Vim as an OpenACS IDE
• Getting admin-level help
• OpenACS for administrators
• Prerequisites to installing OpenACS
• Coding Standards - Index
• en:ajax-accessibility
• Getting WAI-AA compliance from an unzenned package
• OpenACS "cookbook", how-to tutorials
• XOTcl for OpenACS - An Introduction to XOTcl and the basic infrastructure of xotcl-core
• Learning XoWiki - A Tutorial for the XoWiki Toolkit
• Starting an OpenACS application based on XoWiki
• Webinar - Part 1 - Basics
• Webinar - Part 2 - Site Map
• Webinar - Part 3 - Packages and ad_form
• Webinar - Part 4 - Survey
• Jade Rubick's Article Collection

Other related tutorials

• Tcl for Web Nerds
• A tDOM Tutorial
• SQL for Web Nerds
• Software Engineering for Internet Applications
• Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
• Anti-patterns, patterns to avoid in programming and managing systems

See also: OpenACS Mentorship Program

Other useful resources

Web Sites

• bash shell

• The Linux Documentation Project

• Introduction to Oracle SQL Course

Books

• UNIX Power Tools - An excellent introduction to the command line tools and basic programs of UNIX

• UNIX System Administration Handbook (formerly the "red book" - now the "purple" book)

• UNIX System Administrator's Bible - (LePage and Iarerra 1998; IDG)

• Running Linux

• Learning Gnu Emacs

• Linux in a Nutshell

Privacy Policy

Created by Monika Andergassen, last modified by Monika Andergassen 10 Jun 2023, at 02:34 PM

Effective Date: June 10, 2023

This Privacy Policy describes how OpenACS.org collects, uses, and shares your personal data when you use our website, forums, wiki, and other services.

1. Data We Collect
   1. Data You Provide to Us
      When you use our Services, you may provide us with data about yourself, such as your name, email address, and any other data you choose to provide. This can occur, for example, when you register for an account, post on our forums, or contribute to our wiki.
   2. Data We Collect Automatically
      We may automatically collect certain data about you when you use our Services, such as your IP address, device information, browser type, and data about your interactions with our Services.
   3. Cookies and Similar Technologies
      We use cookies to collect data about your use of our Services and to remember your login state and preferences. You can control the use of cookies at the individual browser level.
       
2. How We Use Your Data
   We use the data we collect to provide, maintain, and improve our Services, to communicate with you, to monitor and analyze usage and trends, and to personalize and improve your experience with our Services.
    
3. How We Share Your Data
   We do not sell your personal data. We may share your data with third-party service providers who perform services on our behalf, such as hosting providers and analytics providers. We may also share your data to comply with the law, to protect the rights and safety of our users and third parties, or as part of a business transaction like a merger or sale of assets.
    
4. Your Choices
   You may update, correct, or delete your account data at any time by logging into your account. You may also contact us to request access to, correct, or delete any personal data that you have provided to us.
    
5. Security
   We take reasonable measures to protect your personal data from loss, theft, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction. However, the internet is not 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee the security of your data.
    
6. Children's Privacy
   Our Services are not intended for individuals under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 13. If we become aware that a child under 13 has provided us with personal data, we will take steps to delete such data.
    
7. Changes to This Privacy Policy
   We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the date at the top of the policy and, in some cases, we may provide you with additional notice.
    
8. Contact Us
   If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at oct@openacs.org.

OpenACS Community Wiki

Created by gustaf neumann, last modified by Gustaf Neumann 21 Aug 2020, at 04:54 PM

This is the OpenACS Wiki system, built with the xowiki package. This wiki contains user documentation, how-tos, and tips and tricks related to OpenACS. It also serves as a collaboration area for OpenACS contributors.

Quick Links:

• OpenACS Handbook
• OpenACS Packages
• OpenACS Cookbook
• OpenACS Installation

Recent Wiki Page Edits:

Cookbook

NaviServer and OpenACS with Docker (2 months ago)
Managing Versions of External JavaScript Libraries (4 months ago)
Running OpenACS behind a proxy (7 months ago)
Fresh install of OpenACS 5.10 on Oracle 19c (1 year ago)
Using OpenACS with External Identity Providers (1 year ago)
E-Mail: Outgoing E-Mail (1 year ago)
Double Click Handling (2 years ago)
Setup with docker-s6 (2 years ago)
Interfacing with MS Teams and related services (Microsoft Graph) (2 years ago)
New Interface for Calling Database functions (2 years ago)
Server-sent events (2 years ago)
Streaming HTML (3 years ago)

Subsystems Documentation

Installing OpenACS on Windows (3 months ago)
OpenACS compatibility matrix (4 months ago)
OpenACS Monitoring (1 year ago)
for beginning developers (1 year ago)
Installing OpenACS (1 year ago)
Install OpenACS with NaviServer from Scratch (1 year ago)
Get the OpenACS Source Code (2 years ago)
Install Oracle (2 years ago)
Upgrade from PostgreSQL 9.6 to 13.1 (3 years ago)
Upgrade to OpenACS 5.10 (3 years ago)
Available OpenACS Packages (3 years ago)

External Resources

Installing OpenACS on Windows (3 months ago)

OpenACS Projects

OpenACS Release Status (3 months ago)
OpenACS TODO List (3 months ago)
OpenACS 5.10.1 Change Summary (1 year ago)
OpenACS 5.10.0 Change Summary (1 year ago)
E-Mail: Outgoing E-Mail (1 year ago)

Package Documentation

Packages available in the oacs-5-10 channel (3 months ago)
Available OpenACS Packages (3 years ago)
Packages available in the oacs-5-9 channel (3 years ago)

Events

OpenACS conferences (5 months ago)

Tutorials for Administrators

OpenACS Monitoring (1 year ago)
rl_json (1 year ago)

Non-Core Packages

Chat (1 year ago)
XoWiki (1 year ago)
XOTcl Core (1 year ago)
xooauth (1 year ago)
xowf (XoWiki Workflow) (3 years ago)

Documentation

for beginning developers (1 year ago)

HOME

for beginning developers (1 year ago)
Privacy Policy (1 year ago)

Tutorials

for beginning developers (1 year ago)
Theming in OpenACS (3 years ago)

Core Documentation

Installing OpenACS (1 year ago)

Coding Standards

Security Guidelines (1 year ago)
Coding Standards - Index (1 year ago)
Tcl Procs (2 years ago)

Packages

Available OpenACS Packages (3 years ago)

for everyone

Created by OpenACS community, last modified by Benjamin Brink 22 Jul 2017, at 11:49 PM

OpenACS for everyone

OpenACS (Open Architecture Community System) is:

• an advanced toolkit for building scalable, community-oriented web applications.
• a robust, scalable framework (see: en:openacs-system) for building dynamic content driven sites and enterprise-level web applications.
• a collection of pre-built applications and services that you can build on to create a custom web-site or application.
• derived from the ArsDigita Community System (ACS). ArsDigita (now part of Red Hat, Inc.) kindly made their work available under the GPL, making all of this possible.

Through a modular architecture, OpenACS has packages for user/groups management, content management, e-commerce, news, FAQs, calendar, forums, bug tracking, wiki (XoWiki), full-text searching etc. See OpenACS repository.

Strengths

• Ready "out of the box" for common features of collaborative web sites. See en:feature-summary
• Proven Architecture. Components of the OpenACS (see en:openacs-system) are proving themselves in the most demanding of applications
• Designed for scalability See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability#Design_for_scalability
• Proven in the field. OpenACS is working well, deployed at sites that have upwards of 40K users (See e.g. AIESEC at OpenACS sites)
• Responsive Community See: en:community-culture
• Commercial Support In addition to Commercial Support, there are many independent consultants available for hire. This collection of commercial providers work together to maintain OpenACS in addition to competing for clients. Sometimes vendors work together for the same client. Most importantly, no client is ever left without support, even if his or her original provider goes out of business.
• Documentation is continually evolving and improving. (See: en:Documentation_Project)
• Institutional commitment. Including MIT Sloan School of Management which has initiated and led the development of .LRN, an open-source courseware system built on OpenACS. (See Institutions supporting .LRN)
• Extensible See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible

Use the OpenACS fourms to contact the OpenACS community. We welcome your feedback and can help with your OpenACS endeavors. Commercial support is also available.

What others say about OpenACS

• ohloh.net valuates Open Source projects, and OpenACS' is here: http://www.ohloh.net/projects/3877 and http://www.ohloh.net/projects/3877/analyses/latest along with an OpenACS thread elaborating on it.
• One users review of OpenACS, comparing it to LAMP, .NET, and the competition.
• What I saw at the revolution: .LRN/OpenACS meetings in Heidelberg, Germany, http://www.octavianworld.org/octavianworld/2004/04/what_i_saw_at_t.html#more, 2004 by Cesar Brea
• FLOSS Usability sprint
• Why a reluctant coder chooses OpenACS for building killer apps
• Why a reluctant coder chooses OpenACS smorgasbord app framework over meal-in-a-box apps
• Why a reluctant coder chooses OpenACS in spite of imperfect documentation
• Why a reluctant coder chooses OpenACS though its missing generic features
• Why a reluctant coder chooses OpenACS when learning other ways seems so easy
• Why a reluctant coder chooses OpenACS app framework library
• Why a reluctant coder chooses OpenACS when other frameworks measure much faster
• Why a reluctant coder chooses “trashy looking” and “hard to use” OpenACS

Others' descriptions of OpenACS

• http://www.cmsmatrix.org/matrix/cms-matrix/openacs
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenACS
• http://www.cmsreview.com/timelines/ShopComparison.html?SelectedList=Product20;

Testimonials posted to forums on OpenACS

• OpenACS #1 for high traffic websites (Aug 2013 sample)
• One week after switching to naviserver from aolserver on openacs.org (Aug 2013)
• How does OpenACS Scale?

Try OpenACS

History of OpenACS

See: History of OpenACS en:docs-history

Bibliography and Credits

See: Documentation Credits en:doc-credits

for administrators

Created by OpenACS community, last modified by Benjamin Brink 07 Jul 2017, at 07:15 AM

Getting admin-level help

Install OpenACS

Setup database environment variables. See end of https://openacs.org/doc/openacs.html,

https://openacs.org/doc/backup-recovery.html, and https://openacs.org/doc/snapshot-backup.html

https://openacs.org/doc/analog-setup.html

For creating custom pages, see developer tutorials https://openacs.org/doc/tutorial.html

Administrating a system

• en:aolserver-admin
• en:postgresql-admin
• en:oracle-notes
• en:openacs_monitoring
• en:system-security

These OpenACS packages are useful for diagnostics and development:

• en:acs-developer-support
• en:acs-api-browser
• en:schema-browser 
• NaviServer nsstats
• server log at {openacs-root-directory}/log/error.log

Performance monitoring

• en:openacs_monitoring
• en:openacs-performance-tuning
• NaviServer nsstats

Bibliography and Credits

See en:doc-credits.

OpenACS Handbook

Created by OpenACS community, last modified by Benjamin Brink 03 Jul 2017, at 09:29 PM

• for Everyone docs-end-user
• for Administrators docs-admin
• for Beginning Developers docs-dev-tutorial
• for Developers docs-eng

Documentation Credits doc-credits

Documentation Project Documentation_Project

for developers

Created by OpenACS community, last modified by Gustaf Neumann 20 Apr 2017, at 06:44 PM

OpenACS for developers

Features

Besides the quality components of Openacs (See: en:openacs-system), OpenACS has these enterprise-quality features for developers:

• high-performance XML data processing with easy, powerful Tcl scripting functionality using en:tdom (as of OpenACS version 5.0)
• XOTcl object-oriented scripting, which combines the ideas of scripting and object-orientation in a way that preserves the benefits of both (as of OpenACS version 5.3)
• Automated testing (see: en:Testing_with_Selenium and en:testing-with-tclwebtest)
• Flexible and easy caching, for improving the performance of your websites. https://openacs.org/doc/tutorial-caching.html
• programming in Tcl with AOLserver - A lightweight, simple, extremely fast scripting language that features a clean, easy-to-understand API (Application Programming Interface) for generating websites from the database. (See: https://openacs.org/doc/programming-with-aolserver.html )
• pooled DB connections (which reduces database connection startup and tear down time), much like the technique JDBC uses, but predating it by many years. (See: http://www.aolserver.com/docs/admin/dbadmin.html#2 )
• Component package system for easy installation and upgrading of packages (See: https://openacs.org/doc/apm-design.html
• Upgrade paths for code and database schemata (See: https://openacs.org/doc/tutorial-upgrade-scripts.html )
• Full internationalization, including an excellent workflow for translating content into new languages. (See: https://openacs.org/doc/i18n.html )
• Fully functional content repository and content management system. (See: https://openacs.org/doc/cms/cms-intro.html )
• An elegant templating system that separates code from presentation of content. (See: https://openacs.org/doc/templates.html )
• An object system that resides on top of the database, permitting site developers to create complex applications using an object API. Examples include an object level permissions system, audit trails, and ability to relate one object to another. (See: https://openacs.org/doc/object-system-requirements.html )
• OpenACS is released as open source under the GPL license, with millions of lines of open-sourced applications available to use as examples. There are also pre-written packages for you to use or adapt.

will be pulling in docs from here: https://openacs.org/doc/acs-package-dev.html and https://openacs.org/doc/acs-plat-dev.html

• OpenACS: robust web development framework (PDF)
• XOTcl for OpenACS developers (PDF) - includes basics of object-oriented programming
• OpenACS Tcl API
• OpenACS PL/SQL calls
• OpenACS Coding Standards

Integrated Development Environments (IDE)

These text editors are commonly used when coding on OpenACS:

• en:ide-emacs
• en:ide-vi 

Bibliography and Credits

See en:doc-credits.