Re: I'm interested in integrating microblogging into OFBiz

[Scott Gray]

Hi Richard,

Inline

On 28/11/2009, at 8:43 PM, Richard Hirsch wrote:

Hi Scott,

Comments inline

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 1:08 AM, Scott Gray <scott.g...@hotwaxmedia.com > wrote:

Hi Richard,


projects.

I agree that an integration between the two projects could be quite

system<->user and user<->user communication.  Here's a few thoughts:
About ECAs:

(MECA) events which occur when an email is received.

SECA and the email contents for a MECA (from, to, subject, etc.)

Thanks for getting in touch with us, it's always good to hear from other ASF interesting, and could actually be an extremely useful means of facilitating ECAs are pretty straight forward: when an Event occurs, if the Condition(s) are met then Action(s) are performed. The Events supported currently are Entity (EECA) events which basically correspond to database record CRUD events, Service (SECA) events which correspond the various stages of a given service's invocation (invoke, validate, commit, return, etc.) and Mail Conditions are defined against whatever context is will be available when the event occurs, the record fields for an EECA, the in/out parameters for a Actions are just OFBiz services to be invoked when the conditions are met.

Can you point me to some more technical documentation regarding EECAs, etc.

This is probably the best we've got: 
http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBTECH/Service+Engine+Guide#ServiceEngineGuide-ecas

It only relates to SECAs although ECAs are pretty similar, differing mostly by the event type that triggers their evaluation.

Sending event notifications:

and call sendEsmeMessage to actually send the message.

ECAs are the way to go for this and we'd just define services to be used as actions which send the message to ESME. You'd probably create a single generic service that is used to send any message and then use that service within other services for sending specific messages e.g. an ECA would invoke sendPurchaseOrderChangeNotification which would prepare the message contents

This is also the same pattern that we use in ABAP.  Once you have
sendEsmeMessage piece, you could embed the functionality easily and
then have functionality like SalesForce Chatter.

Receiving messages:

handle any processing and responses that need to occur.

For this we could either create a new type of ECA specifically for ESME messages or perhaps even generalize MECAs to support any type of message so that it stands for Message rather then Mail. ECAs would then be defined and evaluated when an ESME message is received and service actions invoked to

The receipt of the message in OFBiz can occur via various means.  If
OFBiz has a RESTAPI for ECAs, then you can create an ESME action
(http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ESME/Actions) to send
messages to OFBiz when certain ESME events occur.

ECAs are only triggered by internal events, as I described above: an OFBiz service invocation, database operation or email receipt. We don't have a REST API for invoking services, there is basic support via SOAP, JMS or HTTPS (but not what you'd call REST). Services can also be invoked using HTTP(S) POSTs via our standard request handler (typically used for serving regular web pages and ajax calls) but that requires a little additional legwork in that you have to define request-event-response mappings in our XML based web app controllers.

Or if there some
sort of ECA for dealing with email events, then we can also use an
action that sends email.

Possible, but I'd prefer:

If you want a deeper integration, you could
have a bot that uses one of our various APIs
(http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ESME/API) to read the
message queue and then create OFBiz events.

This sounds like the way to go, I'll take a look at the link as soon as I get a chance. With that said, is there any way to push the messages to OFBiz rather than polling a message queue?

The integration via actions is very easy from the ESME side but on the
OFBiz side you would need some sort of mechanism to parse the message
to be able to call the appropriate OFBiz functionality.

Yeah that should be pretty straight forward using an ECA style approach, whenever a message comes in the ECAs are evaluated. For the conditions against the message bodies we could perhaps start off with regex pattern matching conditions and maybe evolve it to conditions like "contains-tag" or something like that (I still have reading to do, a lot of this is foreign to me having never used twitter).

Additionally as part of the sending/receiving process we'd probably want to store the messages an CommunicationEvent records but that should be pretty straightforward using the existing services that are available. For storing each user's ESME address we'd just use the ContactMech entity with a new

ContactMechType.

Why would you need to store the user's ESME address?  OFBiz would post
messages to ESME in the form of a ESME user (for example,
"OFBizBackend"). Users who were interested in messages would follow
the user and would receive the messages from this user.  If you want
to restrict the access of messages, then you could use ESME's pool
mechanism.

I guess I still have some reading to do before the concepts are clear to me but I was picturing something along the lines of "tweet me when my order has shipped" for customer notifications or other types of private messages, I'd need a username or some other sort of target address for these right?

For chat I guess things will be a little more complicated because OFBiz

would want to play some sort of a role in logging messages

You could probably create an ESME bot that listens to either an entire
group and copies the message into some sort of archive. Ideally, you
would write a bot that creates JMS messages that anyone can store. We
talked about this but have had no time to develop it yet.

I'm thinking mostly in terms of things like a sales rep wanting to review their communication history with a customer, we typically use our CommunicationEvent db table for that, e.g. logging phone calls, user and system generated emails and the like. For general archiving I guess we'd just rely on whatever ESME has in place (if anything).

mentioned restricting communication between parties depending on there roles

and permissions within the system.

ESME has the idea of pools to deal with restricting access.

Thanks, I'll take a look at it.

I'm also assuming that ESME is only

concerned with sending and receiving messages so the responsibility of managing things like this and other chat features (chat buddies, rooms,

status, etc.) would fall upon the chat client rather than ESME?

Much of this is handled by ESME.  ESME has a variety of clients
available (see the bottom the page on
http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ESME/Index ) and supports
the twitter API as well (so some existing twiter clients can be used
to access ESME)

I haven't actually visited the link yet but this sounds cool and I'll be sure to take a look.

But anyway I hope some of this is helpful and although I don't really have any time to spare at the moment to work on an integration, I just wanted to send something along to let you know that I think an integration would be

quite useful and that there is some interest among the community.

I'll create a wiki page in the ESME Space to collect our ideas on the
integration.  I can do most of the ESME integration work but I'll ned
some assistance on the OFBiz side.

Great, I'll help out where I can but won't have much free time so it may progress a little more slowly on our end unless someone else jumps in. It'll probably take me a few days just to go over your docs and get a better understanding of the concepts involved.

We have a test instance in the cloud.

It's raining here, I wonder if those are ESME messages hitting my roof :-)

Is there a test OFBiz instance
where we might test the integration.

We have nightly build instance running here: http://demo.ofbiz.org


Regards
Scott

Once things are further along we can patch it with the configurations necessary to speak to your ESME instance.

D.

Regards
Scott

HotWax Media
http://www.hotwaxmedia.com

On 27/11/2009, at 9:19 PM, Richard Hirsch wrote:

if you would like to work with us to get this implemented, you are very

welcome.

Of course.  We have a test server in the cloud that we can use and
REST APIs to create messages. We have also various clients

messages from different sources.


messages.


space where we  can discuss this?

D.

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 9:08 AM, Hans Bakker
<mailingl...@antwebsystems.com> wrote:

(Javascript, AIr client, etc.) that users can also use to view status What I don't know is how the integration with OFBiz would look like. I read about ECAs but didn't find very many details. Ideal would to use ECAs (when I understand them correctly) to use ESME's REST API to send What are the next steps? Should I create a wiki page in the ESME wiki

Yes i have a request from a customer to add a chat function within
ofbiz.

we are looking at 2 frameworks:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nfcchat/

are willing to change the license

and:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/icsc/


welcome.

Regards,
Hans





On Fri, 2009-11-27 at 05:05 +0100, Richard Hirsch wrote:

the license is not compatible however i have a part confirmation they if you would like to work with us to get this implemented, you are very

Hi,

Has anyone thought about adding social components (ala Chatter in

SalesForce http://www.salesforce.com/chatter/) - in particular - to

OFBiz?

I'm one of the Project Leads for the Apache Incubator Project ESME
(Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment)

(http://incubator.apache.org/esme/ ) and I was thinking about how ESME might be integrated into OFbiz. I'm assuming that ECAs are probably

the best place to start but I didn't find enough information.

There are various integration possibilities / use cases. A few

status.

Thanks.

D.

examples: a purchase order is changed and a short message is sent to those in ESME who are interested or the user makes an enquiry about a particular material and OFBiz sends a short message via ESME with a

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