Si Chen wrote:
David,
Thinking about it further, I would have to agree with you. Since
jpublish is no longer used by anything in the core OFBIZ, there is not
necessarily a reason to keep it any more. Maintaining backward
compatibility is something that we'll just have to deal with separately.
In my opinion backward compatibility is important and is something we
have to take into account but in the same time we have to evaluate the
pros and cons case by case.
As regards JPublish, since its community is no more actively maintaining
it, it was relying on old jars (that we are now upgrading) and patching
it would also mean to upgrade the OFBiz code related to it... and
evidently very few guys here are interested in doing it since we had to
keep old jars instead of upgrading JPublish.
This was becoming a problem, see for example
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-311
I guess it just came as a shock is all.
The OFBiz's trunk is always pretty stable, this is how we want to keep
it and we are all involved in this goal.
There are pros (e.g. we can minimize the creation of stable releases,
the trunk is very easy to checkout/build and run etc...) and cons (new
features are a bit slower to implement, it is more difficult for new
developers to see thei patches included etc...) with this approach.
This means that one OFBiz "nightly build" is usually much more stable
and usable that the "nightly build"s of other open source projects.
However the OFBiz trunk remains a development snapshot and it is not
guaranteed that it is always stable; and obviously it is not guaranteed
that an external custom component (I'm not thinking of Opentaps now,
since I'm pretty sure that there are no more JPublish pages there) can
always work without any changes against the latest trunk... this is
really out of our possibilities.
I did not realize that the plan
was to remove jpublish rather than just deprecate it in favor of the
screen widgets, since that's what seems to have happened to the regions
framework from long long ago.
As you know, JPublish has been deprecated a lot of time ago, I have
personally migrated dozens of OFBiz's pages from JPublish to the widgets
in the last year(s?) in my spare time; I think that all the
custom/proprietary components outside could have done the same; if not,
this is not a big deal, they'll have to complete the migration to the
screens before upgrading to the svn revisions higher than 485561.
I really would have liked some advanced
notice about framework changes to plan things out.
I agree with Si, this can really be improved: I think we should add a
notice in the OFBiz news section of the site warning about this, and
maybe preparing a page with some instructions about the migration to
widgets or what can be done to re-introduce the JPublish jars
(discouraged, in my opinion).
Speaking of which, then, does the upgrading of the bsf jars mean that
you or anybody else who actually contributes to the project is planning
to do something with it in the near future? Might be nice to know :)
I really don't know... however the migration was not done just to
upgrade that jar.
Jacopo
