I still don't know if or how all of this will turn out, but here is the latest on the changes I've been wanting to make in the OFBiz Framework, but gave up on doing directly in OFBiz about a year and a half ago. The redesigned framework is a separate project that is now in beta (I just did the release today):
http://www.moqui.org/ The Moqui Framework is now feature-complete for the planned feature set of the 1.0 version. There are details about this in the release notes, including everything in this release and the previous 3 releases, plus a list of features not to be included in 1.0. At this point the framework is far enough along that it is a clear demonstration of the changes that I would like to see in OFBiz, but that are difficult to do in a project with such a mature community and a large set of software that depends on it. Some of the main things are how the security and authorization are done, how the API is organized, the separation between framework and non-framework runtime artifacts, the deployment model (described in detail in the RunDeploy.txt file in the project), the way templates are used for simple-methods (XML Actions in Moqui) and the form/screen/etc widgets (XML Screens, Forms in Moqui), and how the web "controller" in OFBiz could be combined with screens and made hierarchical to introduce a lot of flexibility and far better organization of applications (less files open, easier to find things, automatic menu creation, per-used menu items/subscreens, and much more). Now that the beta is out the next step is to start building more real-world applications with it (so far the framework just has an example app and some basic tools built on it), and those will act as test cases as well. I don't have any intention to create another project like OFBiz that is a comprehensive ERP/CRM/etc/etc/etc system, and instead I'm hoping those will be separate project. However, I am working on a project to act as a basis for various applications that will share the same data model, common services, and derive from a common set of stories too. This project is called "Mantle". To see how this all fits together, check out the home page on the moqui.org site which has a diagram that includes these things. There is also a link to the github repository that has the Mantle UDM (Universal Data Model) progress so far. Back to the first comment: I don't know all of this will turn out. In a way it would be interesting to have OFBiz migrate to use these things, but that may not be of interest to very many in the community, so I won't be too surprised if that never happens. I've already heard from a couple of people who have proposed this idea, and I know some others would probably be very against it. On the other hand, if anyone is curious about such a thing, now it's possible to get an idea of what it might look like by look at the Moqui Framework and the example application and such. -David
