One of my top annoyances with OFBiz coding is the inconsistency of tools,
especially the scripts and expressions within widgets and simple-methods.
A first step would be to make all expressions, conditions, etc use Groovy
instead of JUEL and the bits of BeanShell that are still used. Groovy has a lot
of convenient stuff that JUEL and BeanShell do not, and when coding I find it
takes so much more work to understand and work with the differences and the
more cumbersome syntax that I (and I've noticed many others) hacking around
this limitation with the ${groovy: ...} expressions, which are fine but then
have type conversion issues as this is really a string expansion syntax. The
whole FlexibleStringExpander could just call into Groovy for evaluation instead
of the various things plus calling into JUEL that it currently does.
A bigger step would be to change the simple-method processing to be just a FTL
template that creates a Groovy script from the XML, and then compile/cache/run
the Groovy script. This has the added benefits of dramatically simplifying the
framework code (no need for a Java class for each XML element), and makes it
easy to do inline Groovy scripts in simple-methods.
With either approach it would be nice to make the simple-method and
screen/form/etc actions blocks use the same XSD and be processed the same way
for better consistency (fewer surprises during dev and testing, more general
flexibility too).
As I do development with both Moqui and OFBiz I find this to be one of the
biggest differences that makes working with Moqui Framework faster and less
frustrating than with OFBiz. There are many differences between the two
frameworks, but this one stands out to me as perhaps the most significant when
working day-to-day, and should be one of the easier ones to incorporate. Most
existing expressions written for JUEL should evaluate fine in Groovy, but some
would have to change... that would be the biggest impact of this change on
existing code.
-David
On Dec 31, 2013, at 4:55 AM, Adrian Crum <adrian.c...@sandglass-software.com>
wrote:
> Maybe we can use the start of the new year as an opportunity to consider the
> future of OFBiz and update our road map:
>
> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBADMIN/New+Features+Roadmap+-+Living+Document
>
>
> --
> Adrian Crum
> Sandglass Software
> www.sandglass-software.com
