Jon Griffin's Blog

By Jon Griffin
I have added my documents related to ArsDigita, OpenACS and ACS (ArsDigita Community System). They are relevant for anyone wanting to understand OpenACS, it’s history and why some design decisions were made. There are also some pearls of database programming (specifically Oracle) in these documents.

Originally ACS was only meant to run on Oracle and AOLserver (formerly naviserver). When ACS changed to it’s new version (4.0) back in 2000 (if I remember correctly), they added a hook for multiple database backends. Originally this was for the ACS/pg (later OpenACS) project.

By Jon Griffin

Sample

Sample -disabled for now and forever. This is DEPRECATED.

Actual Code

Thanks to Brad Duell who figured all this out and fixed many bugs.

Several procs were modified and added to paginator procs. You can download the patch file at OpenACS – Misc Patches

Reasons

• Less Complexity
  The new tools::paginate is much simpler while keeping many of the backward compatible features of ad_table/paginate.
• Real Sorting
  Unlike Paginate/ad_table, tools::paginate returns the selected rows after sorting.
• Scalabity
  This proc is being used in production, and has scaled well to 1500 pages (15000 records). It doesn’t depend on caching and all the work is done in the db server. This means it is as fast as your query plus a little (very little) overhead to do the limit.

Place the following files in your acs-tcl/tcl dir (or somewhere they will get sourced).

The Mail Problem with OpenACS

By Jon Griffin

What we have

acs-messaging

This was really created at the same time as bboard by the (now defunct) Pittsburgh office of AD. It really has no relation to mail per se, but did allow for mail type things.The purpose of this package was to store all content in a single repository and relys on content repository.

acs-mail

This is intended to be the new single package for mail.It uses ns_sendmail.

features

• Sends messages via SMTP
• Stores messages using non-mime mechanisms.

PLEASE NOTE – These are historical documents from my ARSDigita Days

Table Of Contents

• Overview
  • Available Tools
  • Solution Outline
• The Mail Package
• The Notification Package
  • Quick Start – jump here if you simply want to use the package !
  • User API
  • Inner Workings
    • The process_queue Procedure
    • The expand_requests Procedure
    • The update_requests Procedure
• Future Work
• Conclusion