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It needs AOLserver (free, open-source) and Oracle 8 (not free, not open-source). You may also be interested in InterBase or Postgres port.

Ticket Tracker, ACS module, may come very handy for managing tasks/issues/resolutions.

Having said all that, I use Postgres for web work and within its limitations it works great. I haven't decided whether or not I'll switch to Interbase when it becomes Open Source - I've recently helped port a large web toolkit to Postgres and if outer joins ever do get implemented I'll be more than satisfied. And the extra speed of Interbase in the web environment I program in is somewhat offset by the poorer performance of the external driver used to access it vs. the internal drivers used to access Postgres or Oracle (we use AOLserver).

You check your facts.

PostgreSQL has a nice little procedural language called PL/pgSQL that works great, and lets you add procedures written in SQL, Perl, TCL and C if you feel the need.

Postgres also supports triggers.

Interbase is a great little database system. So are recent versions of postgres.

And there are partial ports of Philip Greenspun's web development toolkit for each, though the Postgres version's far more complete and up-to-date. It can be found here.

AOLserver is an excellent web server... totally multithreaded, persistent database connections, database abstraction layer, extremely fast.

ACS is an excellent toolkit. Anyone with a technical mind that has gone through its data model will notice how well thought and implemented it is. Really slick. The port for PostgreSQL has its first beta out, and a new beta due in the next couple of weeks. USU Free Software and GNU/Linux Club website runs with ACS/pg and it is great... totally free source software. http://linux.usu.edu. Download ACS/pg at http://acspg.benadida.com and build a serious, reliable, and scalable web site.

Philip Greenspun does a great job when it comes to the web and database backed websites. He supports Free Software (his toolkit and tools are all free) and gives away US$ 10,000 every year in a prize for someone who creates a good, free, web service. He and his company have trained hundreds of people on web services for free, and ArsDigita pays and treats its programmers REALLY well.

As for Oracle, I don't know why you folks cry so much about it. It is the best RDBMS around, period. It's not for everyone though. If you have really important data, you probably have the money to pay for it. Someday PostgreSQL will get there too. It has improved VASTLY. MySQL is not even trying to solve the problems that RDBMSs were designed to solve. Sorry, but it is the truth.

If you are used to Apache and PHP, fine. Go with it, it's your tool of choice. But don't let your religion get in front of your technical mind to the point where you simply can't distinguish what's true and what's not. Let the technical details speak for themselves.

its in the works, check out this site. These folks are already set up on sourceforge and the project name is acspg

Re: few outsiders working with ACS While there aren't as many people as I would like using it on the outside just yet, there are people who are not working for Ars Digita who are working on the system. You can find these people pretty easily, as they show up at http://www.photo.net/bboard/q- and-a.tcl?topic=web/db, where people discuss using ACS, AOLServer, etc. I think that one of the primary reasons that the system has not been embraced by the open source community is simply that Oracle, while free for development use, is very expensive once you want to go live. However, because of this, a bunch of people decided to port it over to Postgresql--there is now a beta of this effort, available here: http://acspg.benadida.com This means that it is now possible to do development of ACS using 100% free, open-source components (AOLServer 3+ is open-source too, thanks to Philip and Hal Abelson at MIT).

Re: AOLServer not being popular and/or proven Hello? The reason it is called AOLServer is because AOL uses it they bought NaviSoft, makers of NaviServer, which they renamed to AOLServer). That by itself makes it popular and proven--AOL handles 28,000 hits a second using it. Of course there are other people using it too, and not just Ars Digita clients. There are even a few hosting services that'll host AOLServer, like these guys: http://www.am.net

So, what's so great about AOLServer? The nice thing about AOLServer is that out of the box it is ready to handle connections to relational databases. No need to make ODBC calls, etc. AOLServer sets up connections when it starts up and your web pages can get handles from a pool of these connections, use them, then recycle those handles. Again: no overhead for database access. Each AOLServer can handle 8 simultaneous database accesses per second, that is, it can serve up 8 database-backed pages a second. And that's on top of serving up *static* pages, which are an entirely different matter. AOLServer is nice also in that certain high level features are built right in--you can send an email with a one-line command for example or grab a web page from someplace else with a one line command (helpful for doing things like Philip's Bill Gates Wealth Clock, for example) and there's a one line command for scheduling stuff to run (like cron)from the web server. And the Tcl interpreter is built in, too, so no CGI overhead. If you want to read more about AOLServer and how it stacks up to Apache, check this out for a few quick paragraphs from Philip's book about AOLServer or for more information, go to http://www.photo.net/wtr/aol server/introduction-1.html and
http://www.photo.net/wtr/aol server/introduction-2.html

Re: ACS no longer being the greatest thing since sliced bread Well, it does quite a lot out of the box and it is being used to create real, serious, heavy-duty websites. Given that at the moment they are busy expanding like crazy and doing work for clients, it isn't so hard to understand why they may not be driving the toolkit as hard as they could, there's lots in there already, including monitoring services in addition to just a site-building toolkit. And new modules do show up in the toolkit even so and there's a list of possible future improvements on the arsdigita site somewhere with more stuff. And Philip is thinking about this stuff, don't doubt it. In any case, if you want to see for yourself what the toolkit has, check out this page and see if it meets your needs: http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/ toolkit/modules.html

Re: Philip's book Definitely worth reading. Funny, smart, sharp. Definitely look at the technical stuff, though, even if you aren't using ACS, since at the very least the stuff on relational databases is important.

Re: Using Tcl Tcl sucks? Well, you get used to it--now that Tcl 8 has the complete Perl regular expression package, it sucks less. But, an important point is this: when you use AOLServer, you will be using a bunch of AOLServer commands in your Tcl code to get stuff done. So you won't be programming in straight Tcl. There are utility procedures that are part of the ACS toolkit that help too. And over time there will probably be some tools to do some of the grunt work (they already have one out called The Prototyper). But in any event, once you get over a few quirks, it's like programming in any other scripting language. One nice thing is that the language is pretty small, so you can learn it very quickly and get going.

By the way, at Scriptics, the company founded by Tcl's inventor John Ousterhout to support Tcl, Brent Welch, author of one of the better Tcl books and a well known "name" in the Tcl community, has built the Tcl developer's site, dev.scriptics.com, using the Ars Digita toolkit.

And, if you want to learn how to use ACS, Ars Digita offers free 3 week bootcamps in Cambridge, MA and in several other places--look on their site for a "bootcamp" link. Or you can get the problem sets used at bootcamp off their site and learn the stuff at home (if you install everything on your own machine and do the 3 problem sets (note: PS 3 has been replaced with PS 5), you get a $10,000 sign on bonus if you decide to work for Ars Digita--and speaking of working for Ars Digita--check out their salary structure (http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/j obs/tech-jobs.html). Might make you want to start learning Tcl after all :-)

___
DC

P.S. If you decide to work for them, please mention me so I can get a shot at the Ferrari (actually, I'd just as soon take it in cash) :-)

P.P.S. More seriously, if you want to do the problem sets or a bootcamp, here are a few pages I put together for people like you:

Problem Set Zero This is meant to help people bone up on what they'll need to do the problem sets/bootcamp. Meta Cheat Sheet lists a bunch of useful cheat sheets that I and other bootcampers put together and some other stuff.