by Philip Greenspun for the Web Tools Review, April 21, 2000 provides examples of how the ArsDigita Community System (ACS) might be used as the basis of different Web services. The ArsDigita Community System provides
- 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
- free and open-source software
- 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://www.photo.net/teaching/one-term-web.html) or at a boot camp (see http://www.photo.net/teaching/boot-camp.html).
- software 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.
- all data are stored in the Oracle relational database management system (though people have ported the ACS to other brands of RDBMS, notably to open-source PostgreSQL, the port being available from http://benadida.com/)
- the ACS will run on any computer that has a C compiler, though the most popular operating systems are Linux and Solaris
- up-to-date documentation on the available modules is kept at http://www.photo.net/doc/
