Hi,I am having little difficulty to envision, What Ofbiz will look like a year or two down the road?
I am personally satisfied with most of core technologies of ofbiz except for Form widget. Form widgets needs some enhancements and even those don't seem too difficult. Ofbiz framework technologies made development lot easy back in day when J2EE made things impossible. Now, 7 years down the road, Java enterprise application development tool set has changed a lot. What I am trying to get out of this thread is, What others in community think about it?"
At different times, people have asked for ability to deploy ofbiz on application servers other then Tomcat, and in JEE recommended style, like create war or ear. I am curious what did these people do? Did we loose those potential ofbiz users!, Or Did they accept whatever is available and used ofbiz to solve their business problems.
There are some JEE spec compliant technologies that we can use instead of home grown like, use
1) Ice Faces (or Myfaces) instead of Form Widget 2) JPA instead of Entity engine 3) EJB instead of Service engine 4) Integrate with Pluto for Portal server 5) use third party Content managementI think Ofbiz community is more interested in solving business process problems instead of building cool framework. We can focus much more on business problems if we utilize third party framework technologies. Some of the frameworks have excellent support from IDE venders, great books are available to learn, existing pool of skilled developers and many more goodies that we all know.
Open source ERP space is growing. We need to think fresh. Take a break, Plan for next 5 years, Set our goals. All other open source ERP/CRM applications are doing it. There is no corporation behind ofbiz so its community's responsibility. Put a plan together. Make it easy for people to contribute. I am sure there are tons of people in community who want to contribute but don't know how.
I am worried because, After working on minilang, screen widgets, form widgets, service engine, entity engine for so long I almost forgot Java/J2EE skills set. What if Ofbiz does not remain as popular 5 years down the road, How am I going to pay for my daughters college expenses?
This email is not intended to hurt anybody's feeling or scare anybody. Ofbiz is in great shape, I wanted to get people to speak up and help plan for future.
Thanks and Regards Anil Patel
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