Hi Taher,
I think it's a very interesting discussion. She made me think a lot. I
agree with your thoughts, but working as OFBiz "system integrator" I
fully agree with Michael.
OFBiz is not a ready-to-use ERP system but it is a fantastic framework
for developing custom ERP solutions. ERPs have a long, very long life
cycle and are less sensitive to technological innovations. Often ERP and
legacy are synonymous, while all the surrounding applications change,
the ERPs remain. My clients in Erp, as in the "traditional" management
of existing business processes, do not ask for a "cutting-edge" system.
Also working on the IBM mainframe I know the subject, and I often suffer
the consequences, not being able to "move forward"
Since the beginning of 2022 I have had to take over the design "from
scratch" of a business application and lead a small DevOps team to
follow the development. I've waited 3 months to reply to your email to
share this new experience with a quarter of feedback behind it. The
project is not a "complete" ERP, but it is part of it. I didn't start
from OFBiz, it was a solution with technological requirements very far
from OFBiz and too tied to an already existing datamodel. But most of
all, I wanted to experiment with a new (for me) approach. Just as OFBiz
is closely linked to Len Silverstone's fantastic "Datamodel resource
book", I wanted to find Eric Evans' "Domain Driven Design" as a
"literary reference".
I don't like ORMs and therefore a very light persistance framework (like
MyBatis) has been used, keeping the queries "handwritten" and not
generated by the system. The goal was to make a completely object
oriented, clean and simple system, not heavily tied to any existing
framework. I followed the DDD approach (not in a dogmatic way ...)
avoiding any third party libraries (excluding Jackson, Apache Commons,
Apache Commons Pool, Apache CXF). I could have used Spring / Spring
data; but I didn't. I have nothing against Spring, but I would like to
use only frameworks that I know well, otherwise it is easy to become a
victim. I would never want to tell a client "you know, my program is
broken because there's something under the hood that I don't know that
doesn't make it work anymore"
In short? It was very interesting! The most significant effect (for the
development team / qa) was certainly the simplicity with which the
junior developers were able to be productive (having already the object
model done) by working on a clean and very readable code. In general,
the only drawback is a "structured" approach at the beginning which
certainly requires considerable design experience and time. Precisely
this, however, then allows an "agile" and very fast approach in tests,
in customer feedback, in reworks. I don't think DDD (neither
microservices, nor ORMs, nor noSql ...) is the silver bullet that solves
all problems. But we can intelligently take advantage of these
approaches without marrying them.
I think it would be very interesting if some community developer were
interested in creating a * small * POC of a DDD project. Using the OFBiz
Entity Engine by exploiting the DDD concepts and therefore the
generation of entity objects, value objects, repositories ... We could
take a "domain", then a small part of OFBiz data-model and experiment
with this approach. Leaving aside the graphical interface part, focusing
only on the core.
What do you think?
Regards,
Nicola
On 01/03/22 04:56, Aditya Sharma wrote:
Hi Taher,
Thanks for this initiative!
How about incubating it and adopting it as a subproject?
Thanks and Regards,
Aditya Sharma
On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 10:28 PM Eugen Stan<eugen.s...@netdava.com> wrote:
Hello Taher,
Thank you for this initiative and sorry for not replying sooner.
I meant to reply for so long but life ...
I think most / all agrees that change is needed in OFBiz but I guess we
have different ideas on how to proceed.
I don't think I can add a lot to what was already said.
I do think keeping the current number of git repositories is good.
More will add overhead.
I do believe that ofbiz should provide stable extension points so people
can deploy their own plugins and functionality.
I'm also working on some ideas around OFBiz - I believe I can
re-implement OFBiz entity engine on top of relational algebra using
Calcite.
More on this soon on the mailing list.
Looking forward to seeing a PoC from you.
I hope we do get to improve OFBiz and make it even more appealing.
On 25.01.2022 16:29, Taher Alkhateeb wrote:
Thank you everyone for your kind feedback and sharing your thoughts on
this initiative.
I didn't get enough feedback or momentum to give me the impression that
this can be a community initiative. I think I made the discussion too
early before coming up with a PoC. So I will attempt something privately
and come back perhaps when it is in a more ready state and see if it
garners any momentum. IF people are interested in collaborating, then
perhaps you can approach me and we can team up.
Thank you again.
Regards,
--
Eugen Stan
+40770 941 271 /https://www.netdava.com
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