Hi Taher, Hope to address your concerns. My replies are inlined below. Thanks.
Regards, James On 2017-05-08 01:22 (+0800), Taher Alkhateeb <slidingfilame...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hey Michael, James, all > > First of all, I gotta say James' efforts are awesome, keep them coming :) > > The reason I am expressing concerns is the following: > > - Having OFBiz act sort of like a web server might be architecturally > straining on resources (think micro-services, this is sort of the opposite) OFBiz web application is architecturally similar to standard web app. The developer can have additional choice of deploying external standard web applications within plugins on OFBiz, in any of the SIT/UAT/Production environment, if it is helpful to them. > - If we adopt a multi webapp architecture now, it might be hard to change > in the future if we decide to go with a lean architecture that loads > everything into one webapp which you can just deploy as a single jar on any > servlet container. One viable approach is to have a build function for creating OFBiz WAR. During the build process: 1) We will need to copy the necessary files over from OFBiz Standalone to OFBiz WAR, with the required jar files copied over WEB-INF/lib in OFBiz WAR etc; and 2) Any standard web applications within OFBiz will be zipped up as separate WARs. This should be much easier than (1). Users can run either OFBiz WAR (along with other WARs mentioned at (2)) or OFBiz standalone in their environments. What do you think of the above approach? > - If you look at the whole architecture of OFBiz, the way we launch new > processes is usually by firing up a Container (a background process or > server if you like). What we are doing here instead is starting a webapp > inside of an existing tomcat instance fired up by OFBiz. This might lock us > to tomcat only because we can no longer reverse the launch sequence (web > server starting OFBiz instead of the other way around). Are you planning to remove all dependencies on Catalina Container from OFBiz standalone? Else I don't see an issue here. Standard web applications, even if not loaded by Tomcat, can still be loaded by other Servlet Container. > - Finally, integration as far as I understand it happens in multiple ways, > but I'm not familiar with this one. For example, you can integrate by: > - Having some kind of engine, and firing it up from your application > using special API (provided by you or the engine vendor like in BIRT) > - Having two separate systems talking to each other over the network > using REST or something like that. Able to integrate via JAVA API would be best, imo. > > So although the work being done is kind of cool, I worry it might lock us > down in the future. But hey, if people feel good about it, then it might be > worth introducing. > > Either way, again thank you for all the work James! :) Thank you. > > Cheers, > > Taher Alkhateeb > >
