Memorandum

Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 14:35:38 -0700

From:	Eric Armstrong
	eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com Reply-To: unrev-II@egroups.com

To:	unrev-II@egroups.com

Subject:

Starter Tools Should be Hackable, Thoughts

At yesterday's meeting, the thought surfaced that we need to know what the other systems provide in the way of evaluation capabilities, for comparison with SlashDot.

Today, it occurred to me that, all things being equal, we should chose the system that is most "hackable" -- that is, the one with the most modular architecture and the most reasonable language for hacking in.

At the moment then, I'm inclined to rule out ArsDigita (Tcl) and SlashDot (Perl + installation process).

That leaves PHP/SlashDot and Zope. The questions as I see them are:

• What kinds of evaluation mechanisms do they offer?

• How good a language is PHP for our purposes, vs. Python?

• Since PHP/SlashDot uses the Apache Server and Zope is a full server in its own right, how important is it for us to hack the server? Can we be fully non- denominational with respect to servers, or will we need to make important hacks to the server to implement the functionality we envision. (The former argues for PHP/SlashDot. The latter for Zope.)