[webdev] Re: Just an Idea

[Tom Hull <thull@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Zeke Lightwave wrote:
> 
> Zope and OpenACS, look like they have a slight learning curve, and what does
> Zope/OpenACS actually do?

They are two different and (unless we get real clever) probably exclusive
web application frameworks.

OpenACS is a version of the Ars Digita Community System software that runs
with the PostgreSQL database (ACS itself is free software, but depends on
Oracle, which isn't). OpenACS works with aolserver or apache with a module
that implements the aolserver API, which is basically TCL. This software
was originally developed to run http://www.photo.net/ -- which is one of
the largest, longest-running community websites in existence, basically a
forum for sharing information about photography. More info on OpenACS is
available at http://www.openacs.org/ -- including a registry of websites
built with it: one of particular interest to us is:

  http://linux.usu.edu/

which is the Utah State University Free Software and Linux Club.

Zope is a free software product of Zope, Inc. (formerly Digital Creations),
which is basically a software services company built on top of a piece of
free software. Zope itself has a built-in webserver and database, and is
mostly implemented in and extensible by Python. (It can run with another
webserver and/or database; I think it's very likely that we would want to
couple it with an external RDBMS, probably PostgreSQL.) Zope has a number
of extensions available to add new object types (yep, it's object-oriented)
and frameworks, and we can build new extensions in Python. You can get more
information at http://www.zope.org -- in particular, there is an on-line
copy of "The Zope Book" there. http://www.aclug.org/ is a Zope-based site.

It's premature to go into the pros/cons of these two systems, but it seems
safe to say that either + SMOP (small matter of programming) will give us
most or all of the requirements I've proposed thus far. I think a third
alternative is build something more/less from scratch using PHP (or your
whatever your favorite programming language is) and some database (the
advantage of PostgreSQL is support for transactions, greater integrity
checking, triggers, and more programming within the database; MySQL has
been working on similar features, but they are less advanced).

-- 
/*
 *  Tom Hull * thull at kscable.com * http://www.tomhull.com/
 */