The recent answers from Ean and Anil on how they use OFBiz w/o its UI made me
thought.
The current project I'm just beginning to work on wants to go even further. The
desire is to use OFBiz only as a service engine.
I guess the data model will have to be touched. But for sure the UI will be
completely bypassed.
So, it seems this project is going in the same direction than Ean and Anil.
Notably what Ean says in his 1st and last section below.
Most of us know now that OFBiz OOTB UI is more a demo/POC to show all OFBiz possibilities. Moreover this UI has not been build from initial
requirements but built steps by steps.
Mostly when contributions from providers's clients allowed it. So it lacks
consistency and does not offer a good UX.
Nevertheless, as a long time committer and PMC member, I believe it's our duty
to maintain this UI and the tools which allow to build it.
Because it has precisely the merit of showing to new comers what you can do
whit OFBiz.
And yes there are new comers starting everyday (I monitor the Nabble forum
subscriptions whose give an idea about that)
For instance, in OFBiz using the Flat Grey Theme allows to set an UI in Arab or
Hebrew (RTL languages) on 2 clicks.
Also you can use it with a Japanese or Chinese UI. I'm not sure other open
source ERPs allow the same...
So I believe we don't need to invest to modernise the UI using tools like
Bootstrap, Backbone or what not.
The last effort we made to have all js using jQuery was enough in this
direction IMO.
What we need 1st is to take into account the backlog of pending Jira issues
with contributions. And I think Jacopo for his initiative!
Prune that and continue to strengthen OFBiz in the field of security (there are a still few pending Jiras at
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-1525)
Of course there are some parts which could be enhanced.
I believe most can be found at
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBADMIN/New+Features+Roadmap+-+Living+Document
It's a good place to put new ideas if you have. BTW, maybe we miss handling
permissions using Shiro there...
Now maybe I did not really answer the question about my motivation, but at
least it's my current state of mind
Jacques
Le 21/03/2014 22:28, Ean Schuessler a écrit :
----- "Pierre Smits"<[email protected]> wrote:
Re: I welcome the suggestion made by David to have each of us explain
our own motive for participating in this project.
We use OFBiz because it is the most mature Free Software solution we
have found for dealing with "real" e-commerce that has inventory
and manufacturing needs. We no longer use OFBiz as a solution for the
presentation or content management layer because we feel its
capabilities in that space are outclassed by other solutions. We are
starting to do a lot more mobile and HTML5 based interfaces that
rely on OFBiz for handling the underlying business processes.
The combination of the license and capabilities are our motivations
for using the tool. We also have a lot of experience with the OFBiz
internal structure and are hesitant to start over.
Our current focus is on building solutions around the tool rather
than trying to innovate in the tool itself. The capabilities we
utilize in OFBiz are well established so we have not had to make
many general purpose modifications. We have also become much more
aggressive about "mashing up" the "best of breed" to achieve
solutions rather than trying to duplicate capabilities from scratch.
