The last major priority that I pushed on was clean ups and
enhancements to the framework. While there are still some big
improvements coming along (new authorization approach and more AJAX/
etc stuff come to mind), I think we've made huge progress on that and
the framework is significantly cleaner and far more helpful when
writing business applications.
I've mentioned this a little bit and started putting some seed
material together, and the next high level priority that I'd like to
work on (and work with others on!) is to add collaboration on
requirements and designs to our existing excellent collaboration on
implementation.
What I mean by that is instead of collaborating mostly through the
code and lower level artifacts I'd like to work with others on higher
level artifacts including requirements (organized by process from an
end-user organization perspective) and designs based on those
requirements, and then use those designs to improve OFBiz. The most
important improvement that should result from this is that we have
applications that are designed to support various business activities
and that better meet the needs of various types of end-users. These
may be improvements to the existing base "applications", and many will
work best as "specialpurpose" applications that are based on the base
applications and that more directly address the needs of certain users.
There are some exciting possibilities for this. One of them that seems
interesting to lots of people right now is to create an application
that OFBiz itself will use. Once that happens we can make sure it
works well for other open source projects (both in and out of the ASF)
and make using it a no-brainer choice that will not only help the
world of open source in general, but also be perhaps the best form of
marketing that OFBiz could ask for as an open source project with no
real marketing budget.
There are many other types of organizations we could target, and what
I've started working on to help us collaborate on requirements
acknowledges this. Some of these organization types will share
business activities and can share requirements, designs, and
implementations. Others will have some pretty unique requirements. For
example there are many things that an open source project does that
service providers also do (such as manage tasks and issues), but also
many things that each does that the other does not (open source
projects don't typically invoice for work done, collect against
receivables, etc).
One other important aspect of this is documentation. A few people have
written on the mailing lists and to me personally about this recently.
My opinion is that this collaboration on requirements will be the
single most important effort to prepare for a successful documentation
effort. The requirements themselves (and overlap information with OOTB
apps and links to designs that are implemented) have some value as
implicit documentation, and more importantly provide a foundation and
structure that is consistent with what end-users are looking for and
will help organize a large volume of information. IMO that is one of
the biggest problems with documentation efforts to date: it is not
consistently organized, and it is very tough in general to organize it.
Anyway, here is the main page for what I'm calling the "Universal
Business Process Library":
http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBREQDES/Universal+Business+Process+Library+Index
The name is based on the concept of the "Universal Data Model" that we
got from "The Data Model Resource Book, Revised Edition, Volumes 1 and
2" (and the new Volume 3 is pretty interesting too). The trick is that
there doesn't seem to be such a thing in existence, at least not in a
form that is useful to OFBiz. There are lots of standards and other
efforts that have some great seed material for this, like the UBL and
OAGIS standards which document information flow between organizations
at many different points during business processes, but have a focus
on what is external to an organization instead of one that is
internal, which is much of what OFBiz provides.
For those who want to get involved, there is a quick introduction to
UBPL here:
http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBREQDES/UBPL+Introduction
To help people get a quick understanding of the artifacts (documents)
and process I have in mind for doing these requirements, overlap
analysis, designs, etc I'm working on a shorter version of the "HEMP"
book that I've slowly been assembling for the last few years (and more
formally in the last 1.5 years). I'll send out information on that ASAP.
The most mature high level story for a particular type of organization
is the "Story of Online Retail Company" which you can find here:
http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBREQDES/Story+of+Online+Retail+Company
That high level story has links to the more detailed stories, many of
which can be shared with other types of organizations and so they are
organized separately under the "General Business Process Stories"
section of the UBPL Index page.
===============================
Sorry for the long email! I know I've also written something similar
to this before, and there is a reason I'm writing about it again! I'll
be presenting about this at OSCON in July, and probably also at
ApacheCon in November, but there is another reason.
Another benefit to this pattern is that if used for projects that
involve customization of OFBiz it will significantly increase chances
of success in terms of overall efficiency and also effective
applicability to the end-user organization.
Helping others do just that is what I have chosen for the next step of
my career. To pursue that direction I have recently resigned from
Hotwax Media and returned to being an Independent Consultant. My hope
is that by doing this I can work with more of you and do so in a way
that best meets your needs. For more information see my recent blog
post on the topic (at http://osofbiz.blogspot.com/) and my new web
site (at http://www.dejc.com/).
My vision for the future is to solve the biggest problem that OFBiz
has right now (applicability to end-user organizations) and the
biggest problem most service providers have (successfully tailoring
OFBiz to the needs of their clients)... which also happens to be the
biggest opportunity for service providers too.
I look forward to collaborating a lot more with a lot more of you!
-David
