Hi Soham,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.
This is a topic that we have been thinking about and it will be one of
the areas that we look at after the 1.1 release.
In general Mifos could be much more modular than it is now. As you
mention, you can imagine that Mifos could provide multiple modules that
could each exist independent of one another. When Mifos is configured,
a given deployment could pick and choose what feature set they needed
and Mifos could load only those modules (features) which were selected
via configuration.
There are various ways that this basic idea could be realized and after
our 1.1 relase I anticipate that there will be some good discussions on
this topic.
Cheers,
--Van
________________________________
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of
Soham Dhakal
Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2008 9:31 PM
To: 'Mifos functional discussions'
Cc: 'Developer'
Subject: [Mifos-developer] Discussion around Functional Modules
andUpgrading /downgrading
Hi all,
I was going to put off this discussion till after 1.1 but thought I
would send it just so we have a discussion going.
As it stands in mifos, every funtionality that is developed is
integrated (now this might be to make it easier for MFIs). But once a
lot of custom requirements are added as mifos gains popularity, this
could lead to features that MFIs do not need. And the upgrade of
functionality is very linear, meaning i have to upgrade in sequence
regardless of the functionality I want.
Are there plans to make it more feature oriented?
For e.g. A feature is developed based on version 1.1 code. Now as a MFI
I want to just add that feature without taking other features before
that (granted rules around dependencies are followed etc)..
I presume, as features are added, hardware requirements might change
(disk space, RAM) so it would be nice if MFIs could pick and choose with
feature they would like to have given the hardware costs. I mean
currently there are settings which can "turn off/on" a feature, and
perhaps this can address this concern. But i think if there was a
modular (kinda like plugin) concept, MFIs could pick and choose features
they want installed.
Also, i am thinking of the scenario where an MFI is having issues with
particular functionality in their production env, and want to want to
back it out, but not downgrade all the way down.
I do realize that this discussion might be a little early in the product
lifecycle because most of the features built and being built are pretty
generic. but we might want to think about how we are going to continue
adding features to mifos.
Furthermore, (for developers) when we submit a patch and base it on a
revision, by the time the patch is applied the database version and app
version might have been different because of other patches in queue.
Once we have more and more people participating this might get tedious.
So if we based upgrades on feature set, and check conditions against
that feature (for checking passivity, dependency) it might be easier.
Finally, this kind of discussion might have already taken place, and
given the traget and use of mifos, the cost might outweigh the benefit.
However I am just thinking out loud and wanted to see what others think.
Regards
Soham
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