Hi Anders,
> I've been doing a little reading of previous posts in this forum in
> order to determine the requirements for a specialized OFBiz IDE
> (similar to NetWeaver for SAP).
Would you be looking at building one? Are you thinking of Eclipse as the
framework for that as well? (I understand SAP NetWeaver is based on
Eclipse, isn't it?)
> However, as I see it, there are three main
> user groups in the OFBiz community: 1) framework developers, 2)
> application developers, and 3) application "customizers".
I would add a forth group here:
End-users of the application.
Believe it or not, but this is ultimately all about "normal" (= non-IT)
people who sit in front of OFBiz and get real work done that makes the
company that's USING (not developing, not consulting, not training) a
particular OFBiz installation some bucks. I think this aspect often
get's lost in discussions.
Now the interesting question would be: Would an IDE be used only by the
groups 1-3 or by group 4 as well?
My initial feeling was that probably some kind of IDE would be something
for "us, the IT people" and should not be of any interest to business
users. But after giving this some more thought, I am not sure I would
stick with that view.
I think that customizing work can be done by both IT people as well as
business users, depending on complexity. If you think of customizing the
layout of an invoice or a report for example, this is definitely
someting a user would want to do. But of course, there are aspects to
customizing that would be beyong the scope of a non-programmer.
Nevertheless, this triggers the question wether an IDE should be
something that lives on someone's PC (as Eclipse would) or if all the
nice new web technologies (AJAX and the like) are mature enough in the
meanwhile to provide customizing through a web interface.
Regards,
Torsten
Anders Hessellund schrieb:
Hi,
I've been doing a little reading of previous posts in this forum in order
to determine the requirements for a specialized OFBiz IDE (similar to
NetWeaver for SAP). Since I am still new to this community, my
observations might be wrong. However, as I see it, there are three main
user groups in the OFBiz community: 1) framework developers, 2)
application developers, and 3) application "customizers". The last group
is probably the largest, because the typical use case of OFBiz seems to be
to download, customize and deploy the standard OFBiz distribution. The two
first groups seems to have a significant overlap since application
development provides feature requests for the framework development.
I would appreciate some feedback on concrete tool requirements for the
three groups:
1) framework developers
- e.g., better profiling and performance measurements of base components
2) application developers
- e.g., better editors for different artifacts, analysis tools to
ensure consistency among XML files (such as checking whether a
referenced entity in a minilang file actually exists), navigation
tools, generators for boilerplate code (similar to Neogia)
3) application "customizers"
- e.g., visual editors for frontend customization, easy configuration,
simple mapping from user requirements to actual ofbiz components
Please contribute to this list, if you have any ideas.
-- Anders
