Platform and Technology

Platform

Currently, ]project-open[ is based on the OpenACS V5.1.5 Community System. OpenACS provides an extremely stable and scalable base for online applications:

Reference projects for the ACS-platform

• AOL.com - The AOL web services are run with a different library, but they use the same basic infrastructure (AOLServer and TCL).
• Greenpeace - A community with 350,000 registered users and more than a million hits/day.
• Photo.net - A community with more more than 1,000,000 registered users, and the initial testbed for ACS

More information about the OpenACS platform:

• OpenACS
  There are some 7000 registered members in the community, maintaining very active development of the platform.
• AOLServer - "AOLserver is America Online's Open-Source web server. AOLserver is the backbone of the largest and busiest production environments in the world." Check yourself...

Learning OpenACS

You can tell that OpenACS has been developed by a MIT professor. The system has once been designed as a learning platform to teach building (successful!) online applications. Philip Greenspun has left us a lot of documentation.

Original Documentation:

• Tcl for Web Nerds - An extremely straight-forward introduction to the TCL language.
  
  
• SQL for Web Nerds - An estremely straight-forward introduction to SQL. Including the advance stuff you need in the "real life"...
  
  
• ArsDigita Server Architecture - Philip Greenspun explains why relying on Oracle as an ACID transaction backend isn't that bad.
  
  
• Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing - A more philisophical piece, introducing the concept of an online-community
  
  
• OpenACS System Documentation - The original system documentation. Contains lots of perls, but not very useful to start with. Just have a look to get impressed by the list of available modules.

Documentation from some ACS classes at LaSalle University in Barcelona:

• Training Plan - A detailed training plan for learning ACS
  
  
• First Steps with ACS - A condensed ArsDigita introduction.
  
  
• Short References - A (very) short reference for all UNIX, EMACS, HTML, TCL and SQL stuff that you need to get stared.
  
  
• ACS Development Process - The development methodology used at Competitiveness.com to develop several large online applications.
  

More stuff about online applications:

• How to keep a server running - A description of the processes involved in the maintenance and operations of an online portal.
  
  
• Internet Component Architectures.pdf - Component architecture and library design issues for online applications. Includes a checklist for library creation and some practical exercise. HTML Summary.
  
  
• Multilingual Internet Architectures - An introduction to the issues of running Internet applications in various cultural environments.