**Wub + OpenACS + TDBC**

[Wub] is a showcase technology for Tcl with its speed and use of coroutines.  [OpenACS] is also a Tcl success story, but it is limited on one end by [AOLServer] and on the other by dependence on Oracle/PostgreSQL.  The goal of this project would be to enable an alternative (nearly) pure-Tcl OpenACS stack and replace the specific database dependencies with [TDBC], which would ease install and deployment, and enable use of OpenACS modules in a wider range of contexts.  Project steps would consist of:

   1. Comparing Wub and AOLServer for performance and suitability for hosting OpenACS modules

   2. If Wub is found suitable, writing bridge code/APIs to allow Wub to serve OpenACS modules

   3. Replacing OpenACS code that specifically targets Oracle and Postgres with TDBC interface code, making it possible to choose any database with a TDBC driver

These steps could comprise one or several individual student projects.

Benefit for student: get experience with web technology and performance testing, high-demand database technology, threading.

Benefit for community: leverage strong but under-utilized code base with cutting-edge new Tcl innovations, and vice versa.  Liberate OpenACS code to be used in new contexts.  Make it easier to create and deploy new custom OpenACS configurations.

The [nstcl] project may be relevant for this.  Also, a similar partially-executed project is described at http://www.jsequeira.com/projects/portable.nsd/

[CMcC] asides that since TDBC requires tcl8.6, one means of satisfying the community benefits of this project would be to treat it as a software archeology and restoration projecct:  take those bits of OpenACS which work well, and rewrite them to (1) provide a more abstract interface to the underlying web facilities (much as TDBC provides an abstract DB layer), (2) use tcl8.6 facilities (I'm thinking [dict], here for representing data.)  The first would liberate the useful facilities for broader use, the second would probably make the code cleaner than it is now.  It's the same project, really, but turned inside-out.

[sisusimple] thinks another way round:  is it possible to make a library for TCL of AOLserver?  Benefit: mature http server,  easier integration with other TCL code.

[SEH]: Wub is pure Tcl.  AOLServer is a mix of Tcl and C, and thus presents issues of portability, maintainability and deployability.  One of the goals of this project would be to make OpenACS more portable and deployable.  It might be interesting to see if one could turn AOLServer into a stubs-enabled loadable library.  But I think that would be a separate project.

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