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Comment by qwertyuiop_ | Hacker News Reader

Zipcar ran on this until recently.

Philip Greenspun's blog posts about web development got me into building web applications in college and sold me on the design principles behind ArsDigita Community System (ACS), which ran on AOLServer and Oracle. When I joined Zipcar in 2001, I advocated for building our new web app on that stack. I still think it was a good fit, given our options at the time.

As a longtime zipcar member who owns Philip & Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing, this was awesome to learn!!

I hope for zipcar’s sake that Oracle was reasonable about the licensing fees…

Got any sources for that? I'm curios now.

I was curious, too, so I Googled it. It wasn't that hard to do. Here's one, but I encourage you to do your own searching, too, instead of just asking for others to.

https://www.cio.com/article/244398/qanda-zipcar-founder-robi...

That's not very helpful either. Sometimes folks on HN will chime in with anecdotes and other tidbits that are impossible to find on the web. That's one of the great reasons for coming here.

AOLserver was way ahead of its time as it was a multithreaded server with native database connection to Oracle and PostgreSQL (as far back as 6.9). Its performance and ease of development was miles ahead of Apache and most other tools.

Zipcar was a Boston company that was founded around the same time in the same milieu as Arsidigita and adopted AOLserver since it provided such incredible performance.

I'm a bit surprised they ran it for so long but it makes sense. Many of the concepts that made it so compelling at the time remain quite relevant today though the advances in all areas of HW and SW make things like ORM less of a bear than they were those days.

But that’s not what they asked for. Anecdotes are great but sources are available outside of HN. If one is curious, why not take three seconds and search?

It was built on the Arsdigita Community System which had a parallel community called OpenACS.

Can confirm as of 2017 most of the software running in production was OpenACS. I try not to think about all the tangled webs inside Oracle PL/SQL procedures. I had hoped the rewrite finished years ago.

Can confirm. (I am 50% of the original engineering team. @tashian is the other/smarter!)

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