Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to A Technical Paper on Java

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Posted by Tom Jackson on

You could start from scratch with AOLserver and be more productive than you could with Java. Just pick up O'Reilly's _Java Servlet Programming_, read a few chapters and you if you didn't already know it, you would find that you have to reinvent the wheel for everything.

Unfortunately, when you compare OpenACS with Java, you need to really compare OpenACS to ACS Java. Give aD some credit. They made using Java relatively easy. Now they provide db connectiviy, nice macros, templating that is simple. And it is still free!

The downside is that it is still Java, and development is still way too anal. There isn't really a nicer way of expressing it.

Another point to be made is that Tcl is more than a language. It is a glue that holds things togeather, which is exactly the problem of the web. Anyone that can program in any 'real' programming language can pick up Tcl quickly. All tcl commands can be be displayed on half a web page. Compare that to Java.

Tcl can be extended easily. I have zero training in C, meaning I have never written a program longer than a few lines. From this point I created a mostly functional ns_ldap module in two weeks of spare time.