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If the software is not being redistributed and you aren't requiring a EULA, then the end-users are free to modify the software as they see fit (or do anything with it, except redistribute) under existing copyright law.

That is absolutely, categorically false, and this is yet another example of what Slashdot featured as an article a week or two ago: nerds acting like they know the law and giving bad advice.

A derivative work is an infringement on copyright, and a modification of source code is a derivative work. See derivative work at 17 U.S.C. 106(2) and infringement at 17 U.S.C. 501(a).

Perhaps what you meant to say is that, without redistributing the code, the vendee is likely not to be caught. This is, of course, also not true because vendors include in contracts the ability to audit vendee machines in many cases.

Or so I learned in my software licenses class in law school.

More discussion:
http://openacs.org/about/licensing/open-source-licensing

Web apps in Tcl... yes why not?

Someone who knows nothing but Tcl, mind you, is likely to be a bad Tcl programmer. This remains true for any value of Tcl.

There's a finished product based on OpenACS called dotLRN -- an intranet-in-a-box for educational use. Email, message boards, calendars, and file sharing are all very well integrated. Try http://www.openacs.org/

This does this mean that the new split off and to be aquired AOL divsion and the community will finally stop using the open source AOLserver with its embedded TCL support. Its used on a number of core AOL sites and also supported by OpenACS.

We run The New York Review of Books on OpenACS which does a nice job for the sorts of things an online publication needs.

Unfortunately, we don't have the fancy web framework in place just yet...

Ah, so OpenACS isn't a fancy web framework?

.LRN is a web based community system for universities that has group based file sharing with a web user interface and WebDAV support. It also supports LDAP authentication. If that's too much, the OpenACS platform .LRN is built on has all the features your are looking for in file sharing, access control and authentication.

Uh-huh.

Try OpenACS. It is an open source (GNU GPL) toolkit for building scalable, community-oriented web applications. Oracle and PostgreSQL are the supported back-end databases and the programming language is TCL/TK. The developer community is almost 9000 strong which is very helpful. The toolkit is very mature and is useful to build community-based websites quickly and has a host of advantages over other similar systems.

More information about the toolkit can be found at the OpenACS website "What is OpenACS" section and on my personal website - About OpenACS. A quick comparision of the CMS applications available can be found at www.cmsmatrix.org (Link to Google's cache as the site doesn't actually have the comparision feature anymore now! Maybe you need to register?!)

Try OpenACS. It is an open source (GNU GPL) toolkit for building scalable, community-oriented web applications. Oracle and PostgreSQL are the supported back-end databases and the programming language is TCL/TK. The developer community is almost 9000 strong which is very helpful. The toolkit is very mature and is useful to build community-based websites quickly and has a host of advantages over other similar systems.

More information about the toolkit can be found at the OpenACS website "What is OpenACS" section and on my personal website - About OpenACS. A quick comparision of the CMS applications available can be found at www.cmsmatrix.org (Link to Google's cache as the site doesn't actually have the comparision feature anymore now! Maybe you need to register?!)

See What is OpenACS for an example of a web framework that's been around for about a decade, has had millions of dollars spent on its development, and can do almost anything you want. The downside to something like OpenACS is it is more complicated and there is definitely more cruft.

Dreamweaver is an impressive behemoth of a tool, no doubt whatsoever. Back in 1999/2000 it was the only possible way to edit and manage websites on a professional level. Dreamweavers wysiwyg power with the older browsers and it's HTML editing features are unmatched. The template engine completely abstracts changes to a website in your developement directory and automatically keeps track of anything you what across multiple documents. If DW doesn't crash and screw up your template dir that is - which does happen more often than you like. It's the best thing you can use ... ...if you don't have a CMS.
Which gets me right to the point:
Sorry, but it's like five years since the early dot-bomb days where dynamic server side stuff was considered exotic and people got payed for klicking static websites together. You may haven't noticed, but the world has moved on. There are something like fifteen bazillion open source content management systems out there. One better than the next.
Who the fuck needs DW nowadays? You don't want DW! DWs concepts are ancient by todays standards. The last time I used it was about 4 years ago in some project where the system team couldn't get their stuff together and set up a halfway decent JSP framework and we had to hack the webdocs by hand in record time. And my web productivity has tripled by now, since I exclusively use content management systems (as every body else does), and be it "only" to generate the html docs offline and publish the output to static webspace.

Honestly now: Ditch DW allready, it's nothing but a huge waste of time these days. Trust me, I make a living with this stuff. And take a look at one of the frameworks above. To save your time, I recommend checking out one of the following: Plone/Zope, Callisto CMS, Mambo, Typo3, Mason, Slashcode, or (forgot this one above) Xoops. Save yourself half to three quarters of webdev time in the long run.
Oh, and welcome to 2005. ;-)

"Is it compiled into native code? I know this is more a Python thing but even mentioning an application server built in a scripting language will have me ridiculed out the door."

You're saying you'll be ridiculed for proposing an application server using an interpreted language, because it supposedly can't keep up with a J2EE server?

Maybe Zope, Inc.'s customers disagree. Or photo.net, a site getting over 10,000,000 hits a day that's written in OpenACS, which is itself written totally in Tcl?

If you feel forced to keep using J2EE because you'll be ridiculed otherwise for using a "non-compiled" app server, go ahead. But other developers are likely gaining a lot of productivity by using more dynamic and "slower" interpreted languages. Check out this 22MB quicktime demo movie of the Ruby on Rails framework...pretty awesome stuff.

Linux Virtual Private Servers for Professionals

PHP5 has more features than PHP4 but is aggressively backwards compatible, thus, with a few exceptions it's as crufty as ever.

I would pick OpenACS over ASP.NET but I would pick ASP.NET over PHP5 or most J2EE stacks.

Since you're in education -- you may take a look at .LRN over at OpenACS site. It is what MIT is using for open courseware, and so does Carnegie-Melon.

It is based Oracle or PostgreSQL backend, with AOLServer serving the content. AOLServer has a built-in Tcl interpreter that is used to build the whole solution (there is nice separatoin of logic and presentation built as ACS Templates package that makes build ing forms *really* easy).

"This query is called a left outer join because the table mentioned on the left of the join operator will have each of its rows in the output at least once, whe reas the table on the right will only have those rows output that match some row of the left table. When outputting a left-table row for which there is no right -table match, empty (null) values are substituted for the right-table columns.
Exercise: There are also right outer joins and full outer joins. Try to find out what those do."

when there really should be:

"TODO: There are also right outer joins and full outer joins. FIXME: We MUST write more."

Not to mention the "RTFS" answers in "TFM" for questions very frequently asked by beginners:

"4.3) How do I get a list of tables or other things I can see in psql?"
"You can read the source code for psql in file pgsql/src/bin/psql/describe.c."

Other than that I would say that PostgreSQL is definitely the way to go today. Once you get used to reading the source code as documentation (it is actually very clean and properly commented, so that's not such a big deal), you will really love it. And you will have the most important thing: ACID features. I hope it helps, I wish you the best luck.

See also:

1. http://www.postgresql.org/
2. http://www.mysql.com/
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostgreSQL
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebird_(database_se rver)
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_database
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_management_s ystem
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID
9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_model
10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL
11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_theory
12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiomatic_set_theory
13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_logic
14. http://www.glom.org/
15. http://www.servoy.com/
16. http://www.dotcomsolutionsinc.net/products/fmpro_m igrator/index.html
17. http://www.firebirdsql.org/

(Please forgive me if I repeat anything which has already been said. I started to write it as a first post but it took some time and I am sure that other

The reason for its success: Worse is better.

What you say about disregard for SQL standards is true, see MySQL Gotchas. Doing the wrong thing is not so bad, it's *silently* doing the wrong thing that you absoultely do not want in a database system. See also Why not MySQL, which is now rather dated (MySQL has grown some features since), but is a good introduction to what a database should do.

Note also that anyone can write a database system with complete transactional integrity: you simply lock the whole database for every single operation and run only one query or update at a time, one after the other. The challenge is in getting the semantics of serialized database access but with good performance. This is what schemes like row-level locking and multi-version concurrency are for.

I thought it was RMS who trashed TCL. Incidentally the linked discussions warn that people will not use TCL because RMS does not like it: Reading the discussion he does seem to ahve been guility of a certain amount of exageration of its flaws.

Is this version ACID-complaint already? How does it compare with PostgresSQL performance-, consistency- and security-wise? Thanks. I am going to start a new database soon and maybe I'll change my mind in favour of MySQL if this new version satisfies the ACID principles.

For other institutions considering implementing their own "opencourseware" there are several open-source CMS options. At this point, MIT OCW is monitoring six: Zope, Red Hat, Midgard, OpenACS, OpenCMS, and Bricolage. By 2004, most experts agree that one CMS provider will become the clear, open-source leader in this industry sector. MIT OCW will track the progress of key open-source CMS providers during this accelerated maturation. This will contribute to MIT being able to share its experience and understanding of these CMS options with other institutions. The hope is that utilization of open-source model CMS products could lead to less expensive implementations of opencoursewares on other campuses.

Try OpenACS. While there are many web publishing and collaboration toolkits out there, OpenACS comes closest to supporting this kind of thing already. It would be very easy to do exactly what you're describing. Go to the Q&A bboard on the OpenACS site, and post your question there. I'm sure you'll get several good ideas.

Try OpenACS. While there are many web publishing and collaboration toolkits out there, OpenACS comes closest to supporting this kind of thing already. It would be very easy to do exactly what you're describing. Go to the Q&A bboard on the OpenACS site, and post your question there. I'm sure you'll get several good ideas.

Here's more on what to do about Redhat on OpenACS. Some are definately leaning toward Debian, and more would if they could get Debian certified for Oracle.

Especially with Redhat's latest retreat into their proprietary turtle shell, I'd love to have Debian certified for apps like Oracle, etc. This issue has also come up recently among OpenACS developers.

Lightweight: mod_tcl
Heavyweight: OpenACS

Anyone used these?

Has anyone tried Quickbase or OpenACS?

It might be helpful (for those who don't know) to learn a bit about the ArsDigita experience with Java. aD was philg's old company and developed a toolkit (the ACS) based on Tcl and Oracle. The software was a bit kludgy in many ways but had the advantage of being fairly scalable and written close to the database, so you could tune the queries and generally figure out what was going on. The lack of typechecking in Tcl didn't matter too much because SQL queries and stored procedure calls are checked at compilation - and besides, if you keep the edit-test cycle down to under a second you can quickly find bugs.

The rewrite of the system in Java, based on using database abstractions and (would you believe) HTML abstractions was a complete crock and ended up being not only slower than the Tcl/SQL version, but less maintainable and much more buggy. I think they got something out of it in the end, after dropping 90% of the extra complexity and object-oriented-itis, but there's no way Java plus an object-relational mapping layer was the right implementation language.

OpenACS and Java makes a similar argument to philg's, but more coherently and less trollishly. I agree with his essential points however. And what he writes is based on experience, both with managing a web development company and with teaching students.

Why let a third party come in in the first place? When you can spend a bit of time proactively to make your customers happy and avoid the whole mess.

There are two definitions of groupware in the industry. The Microsoft one: groupware consists of email with some additional productivity: Calendar, Mail, and basic forms(which are hardly ever used). And the IBM Lotus one: groupware consists of database forms for routing and document management and email.

Competing with the Outlook definition:
OS foundations Chandler (Calendar focused)
Mozilla Mail (+calendar proj)
Evolution
Open Groupware
kmail/KGroupware


And from the Lotus Perspective:
www.phpgroupware.org
zope
OpenACS
And Lotus Domino which runs on Linux. The client works fine in wine or crossover - but is not officially supported.

Note that teaching a course fully online is very different from using the Web to supplement a course being taught in person. I have found that the Web tools available make it easier to extend the scope of the course beyond the classroom, and to facilitate further dialogue and discussion.

...by design since they are not "multi-user". They are more like individual diaries. You would to give your users opportunity to interact with each other with some community software like Geeklog or OpenACS.

I agree very much with Randolpho's post. Ditch PHP if you really want an elegent architecture. If you really need to stick with PHP, try out Midgard. Otherwise, you really ought to at least look at the alternatives. Zope and OpenACS are probably the best open source web application systems/environments/architectures, whatever you want to call it. I prefer OpenACS (there's just something about using a system that was built primarily by highly intelligent MIT and CalTech alumni...).

OpenACS is based on AOLServer (probably the best, and first application-oriented web server out there, which was GPL'd by AOL thanks to Phil Greenspun's nagging. it's multi-threaded, it has database pooling, a healthy set of modules/plugins, and a wonderful community.), Tcl (you'll get used to it, really ;), and either Oracle or PostgreSQL. Thought it was designed for use with Oracle, and was ported to PostgreSQL, the architecture in OpenACS permits you to easily swap in support for other databases. Though, you'd have an extremely tough time getting it to work in MySQL as it relies on numerous high-end and complex relational databases features, most of which MySQL does not support.

OpenACS is highly modular, built entirely out of smaller packages, with its own package management system. There is a core package, the ACS Kernel, ACS Tcl (which contains most of the utility code, etc.), and there are various packages built on top of that which provide both specific application functionality, but also services that other packages can use. The documentation is built into the code and is available online in every OpenACS installation. Higher up packages include web page creation, bulletin board systems, blogging, content management, etc. You can "mount" these packages at various locations in the site map for your web site / application. E.g., you could mount an instance of the bulletin board at mysite.com/forum, and add a second one at mysite.com/techsupport. You can create subsites, such as mysite.com/internal/. There is an extensive and incredibly powerful permissions system so you can completely control access to every part of your system. There is also a built-in templating system which provides a simple separation between logic and display code, as well as theming capabilities.

I'm sure there's a lot that I've neglected to mention here. But I think you can get the point. OpenACS is a very mature platform that's be in development and production for many years now (hell, take a look at what Ars Digita was able to accomplish, they were making millions selling this system, and they gave the code away for free under the GPL). Don't take my word for it, go to the website and read about it. The only drawback to it that I see is that it does have a high learning curve. It took me a few months of reading and experimenting with it to really understand how the system works, but it's definitely worth it. There are a few hosting providers out there (Acorn Hosting and Zill.net) that offer affordable hosting packages, but it's also easy to setup your own server. OpenACS also has the ability to run multiple server boxes in a load balanced environment, so if you need to scale out, you can. Oh yeah, this is also a descendant of the same ACS system that RedHat's Enterprise Applications are descended from (RedHat got that technology when they bought the remains of ArsDigita.

Of all of these, I like OpenACS the best, mostly because of its developer community. There are a lot of great people involved, and there's a high signal to noise ratio on the developer forums. Even though OpenACS probably has the least of what you're looking for, it might be the easiest to develop. OpenACS runs on top of Postgres or Oracle, and is written in Tcl.

Redhat CCM is basically a Java rewrite of the original OpenACS. Its CMS modules are supposedly more mature. It runs on a Redhat version of Postgres, and I think Oracle too.

Zope is a whole lotta product, and probably has most of what you're looking for. However, I find it kind of murky, difficult to figure out. YMMV.

These three are the most promising in terms of developer community. This is a bigger undertaking than it might seem at the outset. You'll need all the help you can get, and getting involved with these communities will spare you from trying to reinvent the wheel.

Of course, I'd love to have you guys use and extend the OpenACS toolkit, and share your efforts with the community!

It does appear to be based on the 'ACS Java 5.x' code inherited from ArsDigita. According to Red Hat's pages it uses the same Java object persistence layer for accessing the database (as opposed to the original ACS's design of coding close to the DB) and the same 'Bebop' XML/XSL system for generating HTML. Since they have made a release, I imagine it's now in much better shape than it was when I worked on it in 2001. (Diary and report; the second half talks about the design of ACS Java. See also the OpenACS project's thoughts on Java which is a coded reference to the design of Red Hat's platform. It says 'DO NOT LINK' but it comes #1 in Google search results for 'openacs java' so I don't think I'm giving away any secrets.)

ArsDigita never made "Open"ACS. ArsDigita created ACS as an open source toolkit supporting the Oracle database. The OpenACS project came about when ArsDigita decided to make their Java project which is what has become Redhat CCM.

Red Hat purchased all of ArsDigita's assets and this project belongs entirely to them now.

OpenACS currently is a TCL/AOLServer based project that supports Oracle and PostgreSQL.

RedHat has made what looks like an effort to reduce confusion by renaming the "Red Hat Database" project as "PostgreSQL - Red Hat Edition" http://sources.redhat.com/rhdb/

What do people think of OpenACS?

OACS http://openacs.org and dotLRN http://openacs.org/projects/dotlrn/

OACS http://openacs.org and dotLRN http://openacs.org/projects/dotlrn/

I'll see your karma whoring, and raise you, umm... several:
dotLRN, built on the OpenACS toolkit.
The Future Learning Environment, built on Zope.
The Open Archives Initiative is also interesting for academic information archival projects. Also eprints.org for GPL software for creating archives.

A lot of so-called "distance learning" projects focus their efforts on multimedia transmission - so that a picture of a person talking on screen can be transmitted... big whoop. The projects listed above focus on discussion and content sharing, which is where I think online education will really thrive.

MIT Intellectual Commons (collection of related e-learning initiatives including dotlrn): http://web.mit.edu/cet/strategy/commons.html

What is .LRN? (from www.dotlrn.org ):

-A fully open source eLearning platform.

-A portal framework and integrated application suite to support course management and online communities.

-A scalable, secure, and enterprise-ready eLearning platform that can be deployed readily by small and large organizations.

-A modular architecture to permit flexibility and to drive innovation.

-A set of best practices in online learning shared in the form of source code.

The dotlrn project page has documentation, news, forums... It is hosted on the www.openacs.org site, which is the parent web framework upon which dotlrn is based. Besides the above, the framework has a rich architecture for managing permissions, users, groups, content management, course management, forums, email, and more.

MIT Intellectual Commons (collection of related e-learning initiatives including dotlrn): http://web.mit.edu/cet/strategy/commons.html

What is .LRN? (from www.dotlrn.org ):

-A fully open source eLearning platform.

-A portal framework and integrated application suite to support course management and online communities.

-A scalable, secure, and enterprise-ready eLearning platform that can be deployed readily by small and large organizations.

-A modular architecture to permit flexibility and to drive innovation.

-A set of best practices in online learning shared in the form of source code.

The dotlrn project page has documentation, news, forums... It is hosted on the www.openacs.org site, which is the parent web framework upon which dotlrn is based. Besides the above, the framework has a rich architecture for managing permissions, users, groups, content management, course management, forums, email, and more.

There are very good reasons for using MySQL. A need for a reliable, ACID-compliant datastore isn't one of them.

A Few More Details

• MySQL has no subqueries.
  Instead of performing one complex query that is entirely processed on the database end, MySQL users have to perform 2 or more serial queries that each must go over inter-process or network communication between the app and the database. This significantly reduces the speed advantages of MySQL.
• MySQL has no stored procedures.
  If a series of DB actions need to be performed in a block, MySQL requires each SQL statement to be sent from the app, again in a serial manner, again over IPC or network.
• MySQL has no triggers or foreign key constraints.
  Data invariants must be maintained by application-level code, which requires building carefully-planned abstractions to guarantee integrity (for every means of accessing your DB), and even more unnecessary back-and-forth communication between the app and the database.
• MySQL only has table-level locking.
  Only one user can write to a table at the same time. For web usage, that falls under the category of "pathetic."

The Bottom Line: MySQL is just a glorified filesystem with a SQL interface.

mySQL is, unfortunately, a SQL interface to a bunch of files based on various index sequential access methods. It gets its speed by ignoring transactions, triggers, stored procedures and other things that, when your company is successful, will need in its database. mySQL's replication is also not guaranteed and when its spotty, it doesn't tell you.

The open source DB community is a powerful force with a lot of potential and a lot of success. That success is in markets where transactions are low and/or not critical to the customer.

mySQL and others need to ensure that they have these features:

• stored procedures (implementation outside of the A in ACID aren't complete - perl, java, python, etc)
• Referential integrity, foreign keys, transactions
• hot backups where you don't have to take the database down to get a backup with guaranteed integrity.
• reliable replication (argue away, only shareplex, NT SQL server & Sybase have it today)
• sub selects
• temp tables
• function based indicies
• automatic partitioning
• rollback (true rollback w/transactions)
• triggers
• block and row level locking. A select on a 50 million row table shouldn't lock the table.
• joins that do not lock tables due to full table scans

Where do you want to spend your R&D money? On your product or on the database that does most of the things you need, but not all of the things you need. Don't you want to spend your time building the product that pays your salary and makes your customers happy? Why spend time on the database, just buy something that works.

One more thing, a not unreasonable architecture for a database driven application is:

• UI layer
• Business rule/application layer
• Application Programming Interface
• Stored procedures (potentially hundreds)
• Database

This is because they use AOLserver which is a massively scaleable and powerful web application server. Some of its features are:

• Multi-threaded - It's been multi-threaded since its original development in 94 or 95.
  
• Native DB API and DB connection pooling
  
• Embedded scripting language, which is Tcl, which allows for extremely fast development. It also allows for .ADP pages, like .ASP, .JSP or .PSP pages.
  

The reason Tcl is the embedded language is that AOLserver was developed in the early nineties, when Tcl was the hot new language. If the system were to be developed today, I'm sure that the developers would have chosen Python, Perl or some other more buzzword compliant language that has a strong following.

That being said, Tcl in AOLserver still rocks for developing DB backed websites. In fact, the Open Architecture Community System (OpenACS) is a complete web toolkit for building just these kinds of sites. The Sloan School of Management at MIT recently funded the development of an open source course management system called dotLRN that is build using the OpenACS as its foundation.

So Tcl isn't just a GUI tool or a glue language. It's also a great language for web scripting!

talli

# by eveander@arsdigita.com June 1999
#
# display a single product and possibly comments on that
# product or professional reviews

Yes. For one, OpenACS toolkit (and a lot of on-line communities built on it) uses it. TCL is a native language of AOLServer.

You REALLY should look at it. This is a great tool when it come to on-line community building. See at their site. FWIW, Greenpeace web site is running on it. It is fully open-sourced, supports both Oracle and PostgreSQL, has a very well-organized development process, quite detailed documentation, etc., etc., etc.

Last, but not least, they can benefit from worthy contributors.

As a let-down of sorts -- it is not PHP.

If you'd like the code, I'd be happy to share it with you. I'd love to see it make it into production, and it's possible that the original sponsors might be able to make resources available to see it happen. Click the mail link on my blog if you want to get in touch.

John

Maybe it was a troll, but here's the proper information:

- Transactions are available to MySql.
MySQL 3.23 release has several major features not present in the 3.22 or 3.21 releases. These include: full-text search, replication between a master and many slaves and several new table handlers that support large files and transactions

- Is that information about foreign key constraints in the MySQL manual? .. Why, yes!

Are record locks really a non-existent issue? Maybe the MySql user manual can shed some light on that point: "Performing a read in share mode means that we read the latest available data, and set a shared mode lock on the rows we read."

- The stored procedures and triggers are not here yet. Thank goodness something in that old link doesn't need to be refuted!

So yes, you might want to check out that really old critique of MySql, but then again you might want to look at the MySql.com website if you want current information. Then you can compare the newest PostgreSQL to the newest MySQL.

For "simple" stuff, MySQL is (supposedly) quicker than PostgreSQL but you might want to check the following link for just why MySQL sucks for non-toy apps