Developer Tutorial - Req.

Documentation Requirements for Developer Tutorials

By the OpenACS Community. This section is a collection of documentation requirements that have been expressed in the OpenACS forums to 4th July 2003.

OpenACS developer tutorial documentation should meet the following requirements. No significance has been given to the order presented, topic breadth or depth here.

• list learning prerequisites to customize, fix, and improve OACS modules, and create new ones. You are expected to have read and understand the information [minimum requirements similar to adept at Using OpenACS Administrating Guide] before reading this guide.

• Refer to development documentation instead of duplicating here

• List suggestions for installing and setting up a development environment; these can be annotated links to the installation documentation

• Provide working examples that highlight the various subsystems, tcl environment, OpenACS protocols, aolserver template and ns_* commands, OpenACS templating, sql queries, db triggers, scheduling protocols, how to use the page contract, how to get the accessing user_id etc

• Show how to construct basic SQL queries using the db API,

• The life of an http request to a dynamic, templated page

• General rules to follow for stability, scalability

• Show the step by step customizing of an existing package that meets current recommended coding styles of OpenACS package development, by referring to developer resources.

• Use the ArsDigita problem sets and "what Lars produced for ACS Java" as inspiration for a PostgreSQL equivalent tutorial about developing a new OpenACS package including discussion of the significance of the package documentation templates

• Include a summary of important links used by developers

• Note any deprecated tools and methods by linking to prior versions instead of describing them in current docs