Forum OpenACS Development: Re: OACS 6 and beyond

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38: Re: OACS 6 and beyond (response to 1)
Posted by Torben Brosten on
Hi Simon,

Yes from an altruistic perspective, the generosity of coding for PG should extend to Oracle, regardless of Oracle contribitors input or other factors that lead developers to judge that Oracle developers do not deserve it.

Iirc, aD supported Oracle and gave away code as part of a business strategy. That strategy no longer exists in the realm of OpenACS. Similar strategies do exist from contributor/vendors that are not finding Oracle part of their market. And the ones that do? Where are they?

Maybe some collective triage process is at work here. Given the available resources, it is not practical to maintain a code base where there is little feedback or interest in sharing available resources. To be altruistic, one has to be responsible and take care of local issues before/while sharing resources that serve others.

A pg to Oracle query converter may be part of a workable solution. I'd like to see one that manages the queries in the xql files instead of generating them dynamically, so there is not yet another layer to process before returning a page.

Perhaps the Oracle community could designate a commercial entity to manage maintenance of the OpenACS core as OpenACS core *and* Oracle evolve, or host a test server with Oracle for testing.

It would then be up to the Oracle community members to find some equitable way to share the burden that fits well in the elite Oracle enterprise environment --call it a joint-venture perhaps, or just write it off as advertising and put your favorite company banners at the top of each page.

Simon, you write: "Expecting the oracle community to fix bugs that one has knowingly introduced is simply not practical." What? Is it that small and resource starved?

Why discourage code improvements of any kind? The manner of style is artful perhaps, but an iso9000 regimented methodology is just one way to continual improvement.

ps

aD's exposing the db to the server is just one technical strategy that OpenACS implements. As Jade and others point out, the tcl api provides a consistent environment for working with multiple databases among other things.