I guess I am left in the dust. I am not up on the "Java enterprise application development tool" as far as JEE recommended style, ofbiz allows many presentation layers, all that needs is the handler. The key here was that the data could be changes in the lower levels (entities) and there was no work on displaying the data at the UI level. Granted I think the display format needs a lot of User friendly messaging, but that is what I get paid for.
When I first came to ofbiz I used AWT/SWT, still do, and I wrote a layer to communcate between ofbiz and my aWT/SWT UI's. So I see nothing keeping someone from implementing any UI they want. The focus up till now, at least my understanding, is the entity and service engine were the core of ofbiz. the data model is from a published reference, which is were the application were developed from. The other point is the Application, defines the data model instead of th e database defining the application. So if you remove th entity and service engine What is there that makes this ofbiz? if you go back to classes that define data models, there is a lot of overhead to marshal those into being able to create a Database from the applications, as in JPA. From what I read, this goes back to the Database design controlling the application. One of the main reason I choose ofbiz over hibernate, was you designed a business application and let it create the storage medium. This allowed a lot of flexibility on the storage medium I used. I was not pinned to Oracale, MS-SQL and such. if I moved from one storage type to another there was no work to get the storage medium online. What I hear, is that ofbiz takes a lot of getting use to, and people would rather use the tools they have become use to. so if the points I laid out can be accomplished with these new tools and preserve what was ofbiz i am all for it. otherwise why not go to hibernate that does what you describe. as far as the future, what a business is interersted in is ROI, so if the software does more, with less labor, or allows the processes to be perserved thru employee turn over, it is ocomplishing its goal. I have had two point i have made my money on: 1)reduced keystrokes, thus reduce errors. 2)make the application look like what they do already, just automated. Anil Patel sent the following on 10/24/2008 4:36 PM: > 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
