Submitted on: 1999-02-01
Last updated: 2000-09-10
ArsDigita : ArsDigita Systems Journal : One article
Here's what's in this document:
Introduction
At MIT the easiest way to discourage students from taking a class is
to hand them a long list of prerequisites. With that in mind, it
pains us to tell you that this article won't make too much sense
unless you've read
- Chapter 3 of
Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing where the
basic architecture of the ArsDigita Community System is set forth.
- our module-by-module description of the
software
If you're a Wall Street analyst, the best way to think about ACS
is "like Broadvision or Vignette but (a) much stronger on support for
collaboration, (b) free and open-source, (c) backed up by education
worldwide, (d) a bit weaker on catalog shopping than Broadvision and
on newspaper/magazine production workflow than Vignette."
If your laziness falls in the middle, here's a summary of the
ArsDigita Community System:
- it is a toolkit of software that will help you build Web services
with a collaborative dimension, ranging from knowledge management within
companies to B2C ecommerce to product support and community among the
customers
- the software is free and open-source
- the software has been tested in heavy use since 1995
- the software and underlying philosophy are documented in a full-length textbook for Web developers (also
free and available online)
- hundreds of the world's best programmers are trained every year in
how to use this toolkit, either in one-semester courses at universities
like MIT, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Caltech (see http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/one-term-web)
or at a boot camp (see http://www.arsdigita.com/boot-camp/).
- the software is used by a community of developers who contribute
fixes, enhancements, and entirely new modules; we have something akin to
the Linux movement but working on a higher level problem than the bare
operating system. You can become part of this community.
- all data are stored in the Oracle relational database management
system (though people have ported the ACS to other brands of RDBMS)
- the ACS will run on any computer that has a C compiler, though the
most popular operating systems are Linux and Solaris
- the ACS will work with a variety of Web server programs, most
easily right now with AOLserver, Apache, and Microsoft IIS. Because
of the open-source nature of AOLserver and Apache, in theory ACS will
run on any computer that has a C compiler, though the most popular
operating systems are Linux, Solaris, and Windows 2000.
- up-to-date documentation on the available modules is kept at
http://www.arsdigita.com/doc/
The bottom line is that if you have money and your goals are reasonably
similar to those that have been attacked by the toolkit, starting from
our software will save you 6-9 months in time to market and several
million dollars in cash. If you don't have money, using our software
will enable you to do things that only the richest Web publishers are
currently doing.
This document exists to give publishers some broad ideas of how the
toolkit can be used and roughly how much work is required to adapt it.
example: online community
The software was originally created to support photo.net, a site with a large body of static,
carefully authored content, comments on static pages, a lively set of
discussion forums, a user-uploaded photo sharing database, classified
advertising, and a recommendation service where people can talk about
their experiences with buyers or sellers of photographic equipment.
If your idea of an online community differs from photo.net in that you
want tighter moderation (e.g., content doesn't go live until a
moderator has approved it), you can achieve that simply by setting
some switches in the ACS configuration file. If you want banner ads,
reference the ad server that is included with the standard ACS
distribution or add some simple hooks to Flycast.
If your community is large and contains an overwhelming number of
documents, it might be good to use the
curriculum module to guide new users through a set of important
tutorial documents. This software puts a little progress bar into every
page that they fetch from the server until they "graduate" by reading
each item in the publisher-established curriculum.
If your community contains several different classes of user, you might
consider using the portals module to
give each class an easy-to-update portal into your service (and back out
to the wider Internet). You can optionally configure the portal
software to let each user customize his or her own personal portal.
Configure the customer relationship management
module so that you can target email to people depending on how much
they've contributed, how recently, and whether they were a really active
participant at some point in the past.
The modules that support an online community include the following:
example: offline community (intranet)
What if you're running a site for a group of people who work together
in one organization? You start with our intranet module, documented
at http://www.arsdigita.com/doc/intranet.
This is one of the modules that we're most actively developing (since
we use it to run ArsDigita Corporation, a 250-person company with $30
million in sales).
A lot of the stuff that is useful for public online communities turns
out to translate very nicely for intranets. Some modules that are more
useful for intranets than public communities include the following:
Organizations that use the ACS for supporting collaboration among
employees include the following: ArsDigita, Caltech, Hewlett-Packard,
MIT, Oracle, SAP Japan, Siemens.
example: ecommerce site
The main support for ecommerce, naturally, is our /ecommerce module. It
does pretty much everything that you'd expect from an average ecommerce
site like amazon.com (see /doc/ecommerce).
You might not see it this way, but any interesting ecommerce site is
actually an online community. Amazon.com, for example, derives most of
its value from collecting reader comments on books and from using reader
buying patterns and preferences to help other readers find relevant
books.
The other weird thing about ecommerce is that there are a million
trivial software packages to support online catalogs, shopping carts,
and the rest of the stuff that most of us got bored with back in 1995.
However, most products aren't priced or sold this way (the same price
for everyone).
If you're a company like Cisco, for example, what you would do with the
ACS is to set up an online community in which some of the registered
users work for Cisco and registered users work at companies that have
purchased Cisco routers. You use the ACS's user-groups module to define
a user_group_type of "company". You use groups of type "company" to
bundle users together according to where they work. This enables you to
have private discussion forums for Cisco internal people. This bundling
enables you to assign a standard discount to each company that is a
customer. Then if joe@sun.com is logged in and wants to see prices, the
price display code can check which user-group joe@sun.com belongs to and
then grab the discount and adjust the prices accordingly.
We've rolled a nice ticket tracking system into the standard ACS
distribution. This ties in again to the user-group tables. When
joe@sun.com reports a problem with a Cisco router, the next available
support person is notified. If the problem stays open longer than N
minutes, a service coordinator for the Sun account can be notified. If
the problem stays open longer than that, the sales reps for Sun can be
notified via email. At any time, the system can display reports of
customer problems and how they were resolved, summarizing by user-group
(i.e., company). If the Cisco salesperson for Sun is on site trying to
sell some more routers and the Sun customer says "how good
are you guys at resolving problems", the Cisco salesperson can show a
report that the average response time was 6 minutes and the average time
to resolution was 2 hours.
Configure the customer relationship management
module so that you can market to people depending on how much
they've bought, how recently, and whether they were a really great
customer at some point in the past.
Examples of live sites using the ACS ecommerce module:
www.growright.com;
www.perfectionlearning.com.
Note 1: if your ecommerce vision is truly banal and extends only to
hawking a list of products to customers with whom you're building no
long-term relationship, then ArsDigita Shoppe
might suit your needs better. It is also free and open-source.
Note 2: Cisco and Sun aren't actually using the ACS this way; I just
used them as a convenient example since these words are coming to you
from a Sun Solaris server through a Cisco router.
Customer Success Story
Here's a talk abstract from Dave Weis (mailto:djweis@plconline.com):
Perfection Learning Corporation has implemented an ecommerce
system that has processed hundreds of orders with real-time credit card
processing using entirely open-source software, plus Oracle. The
installation, integration, and customization took four weeks with a total
cost of $30,000. The price was evenly split between the web/database
server, the licensing and support for Oracle, and the developer time used.
We were able to keep the costs low by using the ArsDigita
Community System (ACS) and the AOLserver web server, both available under
the GPL. Our web/database server is running RedHat Linux.
Installation of the ACS consisted of feeding the data model to
Oracle and putting the HTML and Tcl documents in the correct locations.
Adding our products to the catalog was done with a browser-driven import
routine. We have over 30,000 products in the database with no speed or
scalability problems so far.
The ACS ecommerce module was easy to integrate into our existing
site. By modifying our pages to include links for adding the items to the
shopping cart, we made all of our products orderable in a few days.
Site maintenance and modification is easy due to the fact that all
of the Tcl code and HTML is stored in flat files. Any errors can be fixed
with a normal text editor. The functionality and presentation of the
ecommerce section is separated by using templates.
By combining an open-source operating system such as Linux with
the ACS, AOLserver, and Oracle, you can deploy an ecommerce solution in a
fraction of the time it would take you to write your own or integrate
commercial software with your business.
example: participants in a class
If you have a bunch of people taking a high school or university course,
the ACS can serve as the hub for distributing course materials,
collecting questions, and fostering discussion. It has in fact been
used this way at MIT, Harvard, and lots of schools that aren't in
Cambridge!
Don't expect miracles, though. Internet and computers are
great for connecting people who are separated in time and space. If
you've been able to collect everyone in the same room at the same time
with an expert, how can you expect plunking down 17" monitors and the
limping products of the modern software industry to improve matters?
Anyway, the lessons from our experience are that the ACS works as well
as any other collaboration software for supporting folks in a class.
Just be sure that they have a reason for using a Web service in the
first place.
Architecturally we've set up everyone at a university or school within
a university in one big ACS. We use the ACS Education module to explicitly model the
departments, subjects, classes, professors, teaching assistants,
students, assignments, and grades. Students within a class get access
to private discussion forums and chat rooms. Everyone gets to see
unified calendars across all appropriate courses.
Examples of schools using the ACS this way include the MIT Sloan
School, portions of the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science, and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth
College. This is an area of rapid improvement in ACS and for the
latest distribution you should contact Caroline Meeks, caroline@arsdigita.com.
example: electronic medical record system
The users are doctors and other folks who work at the hospital. User
groups are departments within a hospital, e.g., orthopedics or
cardiology. You have to write a custom module to collect patient data.
These are tied to users and user-groups. Note that patients do not
become registered users of the ACS.
example: auction site
If you want to get rich like those Internet auction company founders,
you will like the ACS. Out of the box, it comes with a classified ad
facility. The classified ad facility includes the ability for ads to
accept auction bids. Those bids are displayed underneath the ad copy.
User A can click on User B's name and see that user's history with the
community. It has been in use at photo.net since
1996 or so. Users who post ads or bids are all
authenticated via the standard registration and login pages.
(If you're thinking that this is the complete set of features that eBay
has, you're right. We built it before they did but we forgot to raise
money and hype it; so they are multi-billionaires and we remain
... computer programmers.)
example: group of programmers
Software systems are typically developed by multiple programmers working
from specs, bug reports, and feature requests. This is and always has
been a collaborative process. We may be guaranteed that everyone
involved in this collaboration has a computer system.
The key pieces of ArsDigita Community System to support programmers
are the following:
FAQs
- I want to exchange sensitive information with my customers. How
secure are data in the ACS?
-
Any AOLserver application can be requested as either HTTP or HTTPS.
The .tcl and .adp pages don't know or care that the request has come in
via SSL or not. So you can configure your ACS to only talk to the world
via HTTPS and therefore nobody can sniff your data in transit.
You can also easily provide access control to any pages or data
using the ACS Permissions System.
Does that mean you're home free? No. Aside from any security holes
that there might be in the ACS, keeping sensitive data on any Internet
server presents big security problems. Someone could attack your Oracle
database or your Unix server itself and essentially get all of your
data. So you want to have really good sysadmins and security folks on
staff. These people are expensive but without them there is no way
that you can run any kind of Web service and guarantee confidentiality.
- What do I need to run the ACS?
-
If you're using the 100% Java version of ACS you can deploy it across
as many tiers of infrastructure as you think best. It will work in a
1-tier system (Oracle 8.1.7 with built-in Web server). It will work
in a 5-tier infrastructure.
You need either the Oracle relational database management system (not
free, not open-source) or the PostgreSQL RDBMS (free open-source).
Unless you are running Oracle 8.1.7 (available from January 2001), you
will need an external Web server. Apache and Microsoft Internet
Information Server work but if you're using the Tcl presentation layer
version of ACS we recommend starting with AOLserver (free, open-source).
You need the ArsDigita Oracle
driver for AOLserver (free, open-source).
Just about any operating system can be made to work with ACS but the
most popular are Linux, Solaris, and Windows 2000.
If you want your service to be reliable, you probably need a set of
monitors such as those described in the ArsDigita Server
Architecture.
- Why is this software free when similar-sounding commercial
products cost $100,000 and up?
-
Some short answers first. Because most people can't accept the idea
that others might be altruistic, we will note that there are some very
big, very rich companies using our software (see http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/customers
for an up-to-date list).
We are some of the better paid programmers in the world, with majority
ownership of ArsDigita Corporation, which benefits from growing
revenue, currently running at about $30 million annually (September
2000). In March 2000 we accepted a venture capital investment of $38
million from (1) Greylock (funders of RedHat), (2) General Atlantic
(funders of priceline.com and Proxicom), and (3) the partners of Bain
and Company. We like money as much as anyone else but we do not need
to spend every second of every day trying to take the last 5%.
Free software does not mean that programmers get paid less. In fact,
programmers probably get paid more since users of free software don't
have to feed a vendor's marketing, PR, advertising, HR, trade show, and
management departments.
That said, we didn't go into this to make money. We wanted to solve
some hard problems in computer-supported cooperative work. Commercial
software is fine when what you're buying is a clone of something Xerox
PARC did in the 1970s (e.g., Microsoft Word, Microsoft Windows). Free
software is the only hope when you're attacking a brand new problem that
nobody knows how to solve. To us, the dimensions of being a software
development professional include
- a professional programmer picks a worthwhile problem to attack; we
are engineers, not scientists, and therefore should attempt solutions
that will solve real user problems
- a professional programmer has a dedication to the end-user
experience; most computer applications built these days are Web
applications built by small teams and hence it is now possible for an
individual programmer to ensure that end users aren't confused or
frustrated (in the case of a programmer working on a tool for other
programmers, the goal is defined to be "dedication to ease of use by
the recipient programmer")
- a professional programmer does high quality work; we
preserve the dedication to good system design, maintainability, and
documentation, that constituted pride of craftsmanship
- a professional programmer innovates; information systems
are not good enough, the users are entitled to better, and it is our job
to build better systems
- a professional programmer teaches by example; open-source
is the one true path for a professional software engineer
- a professional programmer teaches by documentation; writing
is hard but the best software documentation has always been written by
programmers who were willing to make an extra effort
- a professional programmer teaches face-to-face; we've not
found a substitute for face-to-face interaction so a software
engineering professional should teach fellow workers via code review,
teach short overview lectures to large audiences, and help teach
multi-week courses
It simply isn't possible to achieve this in an 80-year human lifetime if
one is obsessed with scamming users and Wall Street with a piece of
packaged junkware.
Longer answer: see Chapter 2 of "the
book" for our corporate history; see "Redefining Professionalism for Software
Engineers" for more on what we think makes for a good career in
this industry.
- Is training available?
-
Yes! We love to train people in how to use our toolkit. We publish
a bunch of free books (you can also buy
hardcopies in bookstores). We give one-day courses (see http://www.arsdigita.com/events), arrange
boot camps,
and have exported our one-semester course from MIT
to other universities (including Caltech).
If you're a poet right now and don't know anything about computer
science, enroll in our one-year tuition-free post-baccalaureate
program at ArsDigita
University.
- Will you guys extend it for me?
- Sure! That's what it means when you become a customer of ArsDigita, the company.
- Will you guys pay me to extend it for you?
- Maybe. We offer a $10,000
prize for young people. The prize is open to anyone 18 or younger
who has built an interesting Web service. If that service happens to be
built on top of our toolkit and the author chooses to release the source
code, so much the better!
- Will you guys support the ACS and the infrastructure?
- There are a bunch of things that you need to have a reliable Web
service, which is why we wrote
this document
explaining the ArsDigita
Server Architecture. All of the elements of this architecture are
either free software (some of which we wrote), commercially available
programs such as Oracle, or commercial co-location services. You can
hire arsdigita.com to host your Web
service. You can buy
a support contract from arsdigita.com
for AOLserver or the free software we wrote that uses it. But really
the beauty of open-source software is that you don't need us to
support the ACS. Find someone smarter and cheaper than us and pay him
or her to do it!
- What do independent reviewers say about ACS?
-
More FAQs are contained in /doc/arsdigita-faq.
ACS versus Commercial Packaged Closed-Source Systems
In the summer of 1997 some guys at Hewlett-Packard were laughing at my
plans to build a free open-source software toolkit for building all
kinds of Web sites for collaboration, including business-to-consumer
ecommerce sites. "You'll never make it, Greenspun," they said.
"Everyone will be using iCat. That's what we're using and all of our
customers are using it and it is the future. Get used to a
closed-source commercial software world."
I didn't hear much more about iCat until I happened upon a cover
story in the October 4, 1999 PC
Week:
"Risky Business, IT
rolls dice when it picks tools from unproven firms" (by Jim Kerstetter
and Matt Hicks). Here's how the story begins:
On May 13 [1999], Greg Streeter was jilted by his e-commerce software
vendor.
"Dear Greg," the goodbye e-mail message said, "Intel is discontinuing
the iCat Electronic Commerce Suite, effective immediately." The note
went on to remind Streeter that his end-user licensing agreement, which
bars copying the software, was still in effect, so there would be no
tinkering with the defunct software.
"At least it was personal," sighed Streeter, IS manager at Herman
Goelitz Inc., a candy maker based in Fairfield, Calif.
The e-mail was a painful reminder of a regrettable decision Streeter
made two years earlier. Faced with an immediate need for e-commerce
software that could support personalization and offer an attractive
presentation, and unable to find such features in products from
established vendors, he committed development of Goelitz's
JellyBelly.com Web site to software from iCat Corp., then a small
startup.
However, Seattle-based iCat fell prey to the myriad problems that face
startups in any industry. It ran out of money, forcing iCat executives
to shift strategy. Then, earlier this year, iCat was acquired by Intel
Corp., a company that had no interest in iCat's customer base. In
August, Intel, of Santa Clara, Calif., discontinued support of the iCat
software product line. Customers, including Streeter, got burned.
I went to the iCat Web site and found that they had press releases
proudly announcing the 6500 stores built with their software. They
proudly announced their acquisition by Intel. They had no trouble
calling themselves "the leading provider of e-commerce software". No
mention of leaving behind some orphaned users when they shifted to a
strategy of simply copying Yahoo! Store (developed in the mid-90s by
some Harvard CS grad students, and authored in Common Lisp!).
Contrast Point 1: The source code and documentation for ACS have been
scrutinized by thousands of programmers worldwide; the iCat source code
has probably never gone beyond a handful of cubicles.
Contrast Point 2: iCat ran out of money and had to sell out to Intel to
pay back their investors, then do whatever Intel told them to do.
ArsDigita is a company with $15 million in annual revenue (as of
November 1999), doubling every six months. Since we've funded our
growth out of operating profit, we don't have any investors to pay
back. It is tough for me to see how we could go bust, but if we did
the thousands of publishers who are using our software could continue to
operate and extend it in comfort. That's part of the beauty of open
source. We have faith in ArsDigita but we aren't asking you to bet the
future of your company on the future of our company.
For additional perspective on the state-of-the-art in the closed-source
world, read http://www.peterme.com/bvsucks/.
Getting the Software
The software is available in a TAR file from
http://www.arsdigita.com/download/.
If you just want to view a few files without downloading and untarring
the software, we also maintain the software.arsdigita.com
server. The Web server behind it is configured to serve .tcl and .adp
pages (normally dynamic content) as plain text. The server is also
rooted one directory lower than normal so that you can see the
parameters file and the private Tcl scripts that are loaded at server
startup. We'll try to set something like this up for the Java version
of the ArsDigita Community System by November 15, 2000.
Check out a random page such as http://software.arsdigita.com/www/gc/index.tcl
(source code for http://photo.net/gc/). Even more
instructive are files such as http://software.arsdigita.com/packages/acs-core/community-core.sql,
which contain portions of the data model for ACS.
asj-editors@arsdigita.com
Reader's Comments
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.
-- James 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).
-- Jeff Huber, 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
We all know about OpenACS , which uses PostgreSQL. Is there anybody that started to look at a PHP port of the ACS, or at least portions of it?I don't want to start a debate on TCL vs PHP, but it is clear that PHP is extremely popular. This will surely help ACS to reach critical mass sooner rather than later.
-- Johan Pretorius, August 4, 2000
OK Now This what is great about the things said and done. probably the worst of all the cases in the history of cmputingis probably getting the things out said and done. What do you say about it? and probably not? What i feel about AOL is that they have been never so great to get better than the rest of the things which are still untouched and probably they never would be. Any comments??
-- The Abdabs, March 13, 2001
Related Links
- Alinari Photographic Archive- Alinari Archive and Museum is the world's oldest photographic with over 3.5 million vintage images from all over the world; the Institution includes a publishing, a fine art printing dept., a showroom and a restoration laboratory. (contributed by andrea de polo)
- ACS Install Guide- Includes install guides for Oracle 8.0.5, AOLServer 2.2.3 and ACS on Redhat Linux 6.1. It took a lot longer than it should of to install this because of ignorance, so hopefully this will help others. (contributed by Jim Hendry)
- ACS Installation Guide- This is the documentation for installing ACS from scratch. It is of *great* value and will guide you through the whole process in every details from the very beginning (Oracle dowloading) to post ACS installation acceptance tests. (contributed by Olivier Grange-Labat)
