To do a really low cost collaborative web server, can the Solid database system be used instead of Oracle? Are drivers available for that software?
-- Peter Tower, February 9, 1999
You can use Solid and AOL distributes a driver for it. However, you'll have to go through our code and remove all the Oracle-specific stuff. It is probably cheaper and better to simply get an Oracle license.
-- Philip Greenspun, March 1, 1999
Also, Solid has changed its licensing fee structure and market focus; it's now $3,000 for a single-server license on any platform. Not such a bargain.
-- Nic Wolff, March 17, 1999
I'm curious about the design of you Software developement manager. Do you have any more detailed info on it ? Since it has its own page describing it this doesn't seem like the right place to go into more detail, but that page doesn't have a comment section ...
-- Lee Schumacher, April 6, 1999
Note that InterBase port of ACS is now available at http://www.lavsa.com/acs-interbase/. Although it has some limitations, I find it quite useful. Among other things, it runs InterBase Q&A discussion forum.
-- Sebastian Skracic, May 27, 1999
AOLServer is now open-source, I believe. I have not download it yet since its only beta version. Waiting for the regular version!Sanjeev
-- Sanjeev Mohindra, July 30, 1999
When we are talking about lowering the cost why not work on open source databases like mysql ? Whatever one says oracle is not a very cheap database to buy and moreover the connectivity cost for hosting it is prohibitively high.
-- Richy Marx, January 13, 2000
Consider an alternate view to the ACS (ArsDigita Community System) assertion of insulation by using open source components. It is January 2000 and the required release of AOL server is the closed source version from October, 1998. Also the 'open source' license is strongly implied to be the GPL, but no copy appears on the referenced pages.So, why trust your software to a system without a strong enough development community to get a full release out every year or so? The trade-offs would be to use the Apache webserver with its larger development and user community group, and to establish the ACS for a subset of Apache configurations.
It is wise to look past the open source label to see if it provides actual investment protection.
-- Charles Merriam, January 26, 2000
Although not specifically stated, the implication of "opensource" is that it also be popular. While I am very impressed with the technology and acomplishments with the ACS system, I fear students will be learning specfic technologies which are not in wide use. Rather, I suggest other more popular mainstream and rapidly advancing "TRUE" opensource technologies be considered. For example, the relatively new PHP scripting tool has recently topped the one million installion mark on worldwide Apache servers. Based on its relative youth, this milestone of achievement should be indication of its skyrocket growth in popularity. This tool interfaces with many database backends but the two most popular are MYSQL (for extreme performance)and PostgreSQL for transaction suppport. Visit http://www.php.net for more info.
-- Scott Perkins, January 26, 2000
Ummm. PHP is just a programming language, just like TCL (that ars-digita uses) is a programming language. You can't compare Ars Digita to PHP. You compare PHP to TCL, both of which are mega-popular.
-- Chris Bitmead, January 27, 2000
Actually there is much to be learned from using the ACS/AOlserver other than its solid proven technology. Vignette's StoryServer software is some of the hottest commercial software to be powering websites from dot.com's to Fortune 500 firms... and it uses... bingo... a TCL scripting engine. In fact, I just converted a commercial site from PHP to Storyserver and frankly it was much cleaner in TCL.
-- Jamie Ross, February 5, 2000
In response to Charles's comment above in which he refers to AOLserver and says, "why trust your software to a system without a strong enough development community to get a full release out every year". The only reason the last non-beta version of AOLserver was released (as of February 2000) in October 98 is because AOLserver is so stable and well designed it doesn't need to be released with bugfixes every two days like Apache. I'd be surprised if Apache could go for two weeks without a patch. The "must upgrade often" syndrome is the Microsoft way to hide bugs.And, the ACS no longer "requires" the closed-source AS 2.3 version (you could get it running on AS3 in January too).
-- No One, February 9, 2000
Scott Perkins wrote "While I am very impressed with the technology and acomplishments with the ACS system, I fear students will be learning specfic technologies which are not in wide use". I think the value of something such as ACS goes far beyond the specific tools used. Anyone who learns to build web systems with this kind of an integrated approach is likely to implement effective solutions to difficult problems no matter whether they use ASP, Servlets, mod_perl or whatever.On the other hand, a peek at the AOLserver source code will tell you that it is a superbly engineered piece of software with a very thoughtful implementation of the Tcl API. In combination with Oracle on Unix you have a very solid architecture.
-- V. Nair, February 16, 2000
Re:Databases - We're in the final stages of setting up our intranet using the ACS ported to Postgres. It's working great and we're really happy this far - a great system. The specs are (aolserver 3 beta6; postgreSQL 7 beta 3; ACS/pg 3.2.2). This circumvents the need to rely on either Oracle or Solid, and the online community support we've discoverd has been impressive.
-- Grant Schofield, May 3, 2000
Three years ago, Chris could compare PHP and TCL by saying that it acts of "an other" language...It was already a fast comparison and now it's even more obvious: PHP is a programming language (with whole share) whereas TCL (and well of others) are only languages of script.
-- Fabrice PELLEAU, January 9, 2003