Thanks Anil for starting this thread. I have been asking these very
questions many time while working on the OFBiz. Your POV about the
concentration on applications instead of the framework is something very
interesting. I found OFBiz community two good things about the OFBiz and
community. OFBiz data model and domain knowledge of the community is is
great. Therefore, community can certainly leverage on these two.
Though this may be premature to discuss specif technologies to be used,
however, I would like to mention that OSGi based component model and
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) may be two interesting technologies to
think about.
http://servicemix.apache.org/introduction-to-esb.html
http://java.sys-con.com/node/117740?page=1
Thanks,
Raj
Anil Patel wrote:
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 management
I 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
