Saturday, 6/24, I spent the day with about a hundred or so other developers interested in learning about the tools behind Ars Digita and Photo.net. Philip Greenspun gave the lecture on the tools used, which include AOLServer, Oracle, and Tcl. Most of the lecture revolved around material that is covered in his book, Phil and Alex’s Guide To Web Publising.
freddy got fingered download I came away with the feeling that I’ve been missing some basic ideas for quite a while now. I think that might be natural when an MIT Doctorate Professor leads a presentation. It was facinating to hear him mention things that were not part of Tim Berners-Lee’s initial vision of the web, such as file extensions. Apparently, this was an add-on by NCSA, not TBL. The fascinating part is that Philip gets this information from conversations with TBL, who works in the same building, the MIT LCS. Here are some of the key points:
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Key factor is a scaleable RDBMS system tied to the back-end of the site
A solid webserver API helps tremendously in developing custom solutions
Productive online communities are possible using this structure
Develop a user-centric (provide users with voice, feedback mechanism, personalization, and authorship) architecture and concept for the site
Well, those are a few. I’m sure Philip would add more to the list, just read the book. Overall, I highly recommend his lectures to anyone, and the book does make a good coffee-table book (Philip’s own recommendation on possible uses for it).