Design and Platorm Info for JamesThornton.com

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Design and Platform Info

JamesThornton.com has been engineered using the ArsDigita Community System (ACS), AOLserver, PostgreSQL, and GNU/Linux.

ArsDigita Community System (ACS)

The ArsDigita Community System (ACS) is a free open-source toolkit originally developed by Philip Greenspun for his MIT doctoral thesis. Since then, Greenspun has formed ArsDigita, "the leading provider of flexible, open source e-business solutions" which develops and uses the ACS "to build major websites."
Actually, JamesThornton.com uses OpenACS -- ACS ported for use with PostreSQL (free and open-source) instead of Oracle (expensive and closed-source).

AOLserver

AOLserver is a free and open-source Web server. The ACS was originally developed for use with AOLserver, but with mod_aolserver, you can use ACS with Apache. When JamesThornton.com was a purely static site, it was served with Apache, but now that it is a dynamic, database driven site, it is served from AOLserver, a server that pools its connections to relational database management systems. If a Web server pools it database connections, then it does not have the overhead associated with building up and tearing down database connections for each transaction (this makes it faster). Apache does not offer database pooling.
To learn more about AOLserver, read Philip Greenspun's "Introduction to AOLserver Part 1 and Part 2."
Also see: Tcl in AOL Digital City The Architecture of a Multithreaded High-Performance Web Site

PostgreSQL

This site's source of persistence is PostgreSQL -- a free, open-source, and true ACID-compliant relational database management system (RDBMS). Why Not MySQL?

GNU/Linux

Even though JamesThornton.com uses PostgreSQL for its database, Oracle is required to complete the ArsDigita ACS 4.x problem sets (similar to those used to teach MIT course 6.916, Software Engineering of Innovative Web Services). Because Oracle does not provide a free developer license for SGI/IRIX, I decided to switch to the Intel/GNU/Linux platform. If you read Oracle's Release Note for Oracle 8i on Intel-Linux and the FAQ, then you will find that Oracle 8i, regarding GNU/Linux, is "certified with Red Hat 6.0...certification for other distributions is currently in progress." Upon learning this, I opted to use Red Hat's flavor of GNU/Linux.
Here's why you should always say GNU/Linux instead of Linux.