Forum OpenACS Q&A: running ADP/TCL pages without any interference

Hi guys

I am developing a test system using OpenACS as the overall framework, mainly because I really like the new database API and I see use downstream for the community features.

My question is: I would like to run pages under a subdirectory that are NOT processed by OpenACS, ie just interpreted directly by AOLserver.  So far I have not been able to do that and I can't see an obvious way to tell OpenACS to leave a specific directory alone. Anyone have any suggestions?

As a fall back, is there a way to load the database API without any of the community/templating/etc framework, ie just access to API procs? (lightweight OpenACS to so speak)

thanks
Jamie

PS anyone looking for work might contact me as we may have positions open in Arizona or New Mexico

By default, the OpenACS Request Processor runs as an AOLserver preauth filter and intercepts all requests. This isn't really necessary to the OpenACS design, and it's definitely possible to hack it to do something different. E.g., you could probably change it to ignore some URLs.

Several folks here and/or on the AOLserver list have talked about tweaking the Request Processor to integrate more nicely with other AOLserver filters, but AFAIK no one has contributed any such changes back to OpenACS.

It is feasible to make the OpenACS db_* API (and lots other useful stuff from the acs-tcl package) run standalone in AOLserver without OpenACS. I did that once long ago, for ACS 4.2. However, the OpenACS code currently does not come set up to work that way out of the box, you'd have to hack on it.

The OpenACS maintainers I've talked to about this are basically in favor of changing the Tcl code to work out of the box both with and without OpenACS (and ideally both in AOLserver and tclsh as well), it's just never been a priority for anyone to actually do. (Including me - I volunteered to do it sometime, but I've no idea when I might actually get to it.)