Inline On May 20, 2008, at 1:53 PM, Ean Schuessler wrote:
----- "Tim Ruppert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:Yeah - great stuff! Ean, what are your thoughts on GSP? Any other ideas on the templating side that seem like a big win?We've settled on running Groovy events for most of our page setup that interacts with the OFBiz business logic and then dropping the result into Velocity templates. The benefit there is that Velocity is a much more constrained environment that makes it hard for people with content editing level access to access lower level controls.
Yep - looks like communities about to follow suit! On Velocity, I haven't used it that much, so I don't know all of the benefits - it would be interesting to revisit it in this context.
As you know, we've been working on a templating design that allows a more incremental development approach. We wanted to make the whole page framework a lot more malleable at runtime without requiring a lot of restarts and we have some awesome progress in that department. We definitely want to open this stuff up to the community at large and just need to get some time to produce some introductory documentation and videos so that we aren't trying to answer questions in one-on-one email.We have definitely done some new things with templating that I'm not aware of any other system offering. We've created a system of web site inheritance that allows sites to fractionally override a master template site. This is a very useful way to change the behavior of things like an ecommerce site without having to copy and modify the entire baseline.
Dude, as I've been saying for over a year now, we need to get this stuff back into the project. The ideas are solid and have an opportunity to make a difference in the way that people develop apps on OFBiz.
I really need to dig back into the OFBiz widgets and see what we can do to bond the FormWidget framework into our model. At the same time, I've been evaluating things like Google Gadgets and GWT to see if that is the way to go. For certain, I'm not satisfied with any of the form handling and GUI building we currently have. That's not a reflection on the quality of work that has been done, because there is tons of good stuff there, but rather where I think we need to be to compete with the cutting edge in consumer facing websites.
I'm not a huge fan of any of the Google front end code they've been developing. We tend to do things at a bit more of a lower level, but we're trying to get some of that into screen widgets so it's a bit more reusable as well.
Slight left turn, I think there is very interesting potential in building a gateway between the OFBiz party model and the Open Social initiative. It is hard to say whether that is a portal technology or a GUI technology or both.
+1
-- Ean Schuessler, CTO Brainfood.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.brainfood.com - 214-720-0700 x 315
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