[CIMC-working] Re: Color test

[Ian Bicking]

On Tue, 2002-10-29 at 13:55, Doug Morris wrote:
> I remember mention of there being a big revision going on of active...
> what do you think of that?

There's many revisions.  SF Active is the one with closest ties to
Standard Active -- all the others are significantly divergent.

Mir is popular in Europe, I think in large part because it's well
internationalized.  It also uses static publishing, where articles are
published to plain HTML pages, and served from there.  This is more
robust (since once something is successfully published it's not going to
go anywhere), requires less load (serving static pages is essentially
bandwidth-limited), and also much easier to mirror.  But it's also
written in Java, which makes it much harder to work with.  Of course,
mirroring can take a few forms -- mirroring past content for robustness
against technical, legal, or other obstacles; mirroring present content
for load reasons; and mirroring the live site so a functional site can
be moved in case of an obstacle.  Static publishing only helps with the
first two -- the last is always more complicated, and Mir's Java makes
it even more complicated (since Java is poorly supported with free
software).

SF Active is largely like active, with a few added features and lots of
code cleanup.  Also uses MySQL, which is more robust under load, and
easier to work with in several ways.  Written in PHP, like Standard.

dadaIMC is a new codebase written from scratch.  It's fairly similar to
SF Active in features, but I think with greater emphasis on quality of
code -- new features are also being added quickly, and I think it's
overtaking SF Active.  Also written in PHP, with a MySQL database.

There's a couple sites that use other kinds of software developed for
other purposes -- Slash (which powers slashdot.org) and PostNuke (a
general-purpose web framework) are being used, I believe.  I don't see
any real attraction to those.

Those are all the codebases that seem ready to be used.  There's some
others in development, but I don't think we need to concern ourselves
with those now.

  Ian