Open ACS/.LRN Conference 2006: Slides

Open ACS/.LRN Conference 2006

slides for Philip Greenspun; Novemeber 2006

To talk about today...

Close to $1 billion has been invested in building software toolkits to support Internet applications. Why is ACS still as good as anything out there?

today's underlying tools are no better (Ruby on Rails and ASP.NET aren't better than PerlCGI or AOLserver/Tcl); if there were a dramatically better development environment (page flow as a first-class object), maybe someone would finally build something better
programmers given specifications develop very inefficiently compared to programmers working closely with users at a real running site
average programmer gets dumber every year
systems integration sounds cheap and easy to managers, but is painful and difficult for programmers; hardly any company or open-source project has attempted the range that ACS covers

1993: Published Travels with Samantha
1995: began working with AOLserver at Hearst Corporation and adding RDBMS-backed features to photo.net
late 1990s: released successive versions of ACS from the running photo.net site
1997-2001: ArsDigita Corporation built out to provide support and service to organizations using ACS
2000: photo.net spun off to a team of MIT PhDs to be run as a separate business (raised $500,000 from friends and family)
2001: ArsDigita Corporation self-destructs with an attempt to
2001: photo.net fails as a business; weak revenue stream from advertising insufficient to pay salaries
2006: the old guys (Philip and Jin) come back to photo.net; hope derives from improved market for Internet advertising (which itself depends on better targeting)

porting from ACS 3.2 (massively kludged) to ACS 3.4 (clean install); OpenACS was considered but rejected
RealName system
editorial wiki
best community/subcommunity features of Myspace, Friendster
(photo-specific) much improved photo gallery software, including hooks for high-quality printing and stock photo sales

lack of unified data model for content (http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/ tells the students to put articles, comments, bboard postings, etc., in one table)