Sharoon, I'd enjoy the opportunity to chat with you on IRC. (Millions of products?!? Yes, I'd like to hear more.) I wonder if you could reserve some time for me sometime soon, maybe as much as an hour? Also, are you in Florida as your Twitter profile suggests? If not, I hope you might take into account my time zone is currently GMT-5 if you suggest a time to chat.

Thank you, especially for your final comment on Tryton and Magento. It's a brilliant summary and answers my question succinctly. This thread fits in with a series of blog posts I've been working on, considering the use of Tryton as a back-end for an ecommerce. I know you've already done this. (You've also already written a UPS connector for OpenERP, and I should be using that rather than writing my own, but I learn slowly and often with my fingers.)

Rob Martin

On 06/16/2011 02:57 PM, Sharoon Thomas wrote:
Hello Everyone,

Thanks for your quick and frank feedback!

First things first - I belong to the same camp `Magento Sucks!!`-but it works and the recent acquisition by ebay [1] is a big example of this. There should be thousands of customers using magento and there is a large ecosystem of developers and community offering plugins and extensions like no other open source ecommerce project [2]. It is also available with so many hosting service providers on a one click install and this makes it even more popular.

OTOH, Magento's stock management is as fragile as having a static field against product, which stores the current stock and is subtracted every time something is sold. The stock update means, changing the value of this field to a higher value. This basically means - there is no inventory management - forget about purchase and financial management.

When I first began writing the magento openerp connector, there were several design concepts I got wrong, which was mainly from my perspective to smaller businesses with few products. The project received large contributions though limited to a handful of companies which was skilled enough to work on the project. Today its one of the largest and most complicated modules (-ve) of OpenERP, but its one of the 'hottest' and most vibrant sub projects of openERP. OpenERP partners (even the ones who have no idea what the project is) receive several enquiries everyday for implementing OpenERP for magento and its quite surprising that most often they are from large companies who made the mistake of installing magento and now need something to back it up.

Now to the pro's and con's of an integrated solution:

We built Callisto for OpenERP and Nereid for Tryton - which makes OpenERP and Tryton into web frameworks respectively on which we built the e-commerce systems. However, the application of both is quite different from that of Magento. We have extremely specific implementations of both (I cannot disclose the sites at the moment on a public forum) which address specific custom requirements of the businesses we implemented them for and in-fact one of our customers for nereid has millions of products in their catalog. In both cases the customers were willing to make a substantial investment in the project because their requirements were not something that could be addressed directly by any of the existing open source e-commerce solutions and their requirements were fulfilled more by the ERP part than the e-commerce part. This motivated them to sacrifice the benefit of an e-commerce system like magento (where they would have got most of the plugins like payment gateways for free) and chose Nereid based e-commerce for their system.

In short I feel that both the connector to magento and integrated e-commerce solution addresses totally different requirements. An integration with magento does not add `The best e-commerce possibility for Tryton` but does make `A great ERP backend for magento`. Feel free to ask any of the questions you may have. I am also available on the IRC if you want to talk about this.


Thanks

Sharoon Thomas


[1] http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/ebay-agrees-to-acquire-magento/
[2] http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect


On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 1:53 PM, Rob Martin <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

    I would indeed be interested in hearing of Sharoon's experience
    with Callisto. Also, as I recall, OpenLabs used Django and Tryton
    for their own website.

    Clearly Tryton is not providing a content management system
    appropriate for a full website, although with the GSoC project on
    rich text editing, it seems Tryton might be more ready to manage
    catalog pages. Much of the other functionality is exactly what an
    ERP system does, and Tryton does or will do - order entry and
    fulfilment, shipping, invoicing and credit card charges, etc.
    We're working a project with MODX for content management and
    OpenERP for the rest.



    On 06/16/2011 09:33 AM, Albert Cervera i Areny wrote:

    A Dijous, 16 de juny de 2011 16:28:37, zodman va escriure:

    > i think manage another software with different technology its more

    > complicated than make a e-commerce solution with tryton

    >

    > For experience on others cases make a middleware between two
    software will

    > be dificult and maintain synced too.

    >

    > The best in my opinion it is make application what comunicate
    with tryton

    > and tryton core will be the heart of all.

    > For it exists proteus and proteus.js Only needed make a webapp
    what use

    > proteus.


    Although the solution is not trivial I agree. We suffer daily the
    problems originated by Magento and osCommerce connectors for
    OpenERP and I think an integrated solution would be better (even
    if commercially a little bit more difficult to sell).


    Maybe Sharoon can provide us with feedback if this approach
    worked for them with Callisto.


    >

    > On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 9:32 AM, Rob Martin
    <[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected]> wrote:

    > > Sharoon, and the Tryton community,

    > >

    > > I've paid only a little attention to the Magento Connectors
    projects for

    > > both Tryton and OpenERP, mostly noticing that the interest is
    strong and

    > > activity seems pretty vibrant. The thing is, I don't
    understand why, and

    > > I wonder if anyone might be willing to provide me feedback as
    to why

    > > they think it's important or valuable to connect Tryton to
    Magento? I

    > > know that Magento has features that Tryton does not, but it
    also seems

    > > there is significant overlap. What makes Magento bring to the
    project?

    > >

    > > Rob

    > >

    > >

    > >

    > > On Jun 16, 2011, at 8:23 AM, Sharoon Thomas
    <[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected]>

    > > wrote:

    > >

    > > Hello Everyone,

    > >

    > > Some of us at Openlabs has been planning and working on the
    Magento

    > > connector for Tryton from the past 9 months. From our initial
    research

    > > and lessons learnt from building magentoerpconnect [1] for
    OpenERP, we

    > > had identified key issues that needed solutions before we
    attempted to

    > > build a

    > >

    > > tryton connector and they were:

    > > 1. Clean transformation of EAV [2] in magento to Tryton: In
    OpenERP we

    > > dynamically create new fields and extend the product table.
    However,

    > > this seemed to work well for small customers, but larger

    > > implementation of magento started meeting roadblocks. An
    example of

    > > the same was an implementation hitting the max col size of
    1600 in

    > > the product table [3]. We addressed this with an object/document

    > > datastore backend for tryton - Mongo DB [4].

    > > 2. The second issue was a clean API to connect to magento
    rather than

    > > raw XML RPC calls in between module code. This was also
    implemented in

    > > the magento python module [5].

    > >

    > > And now we think its time to start working on the module and
    we request

    > > interested community members to participate in the project to
    build

    > > blueprints, write code, documentation and test the features.
    If you dont

    > > write code, you could still contribute with ideas, and manual
    testing. We

    > > have chosen github for project hosting [6] and the empty
    space (as of

    > > this writing) has been created. (For the mercurial fan boys :
    you can

    > > still push from hg to the git repo [7].)

    > >

    > > For Team Openlabs

    > >

    > > Sharoon Thomas

    > >

    > > [1] <http://launchpad.net/magentoerpconnect>

    > > http://launchpad.net/magentoerpconnect

    > >

    > > [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-attribute-value_model>

    > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-attribute-value_model

    > >

    > > [3] <https://bugs.launchpad.net/magentoerpconnect/+bug/648667>

    > > https://bugs.launchpad.net/magentoerpconnect/+bug/648667

    > >

    > > [4] <https://bitbucket.org/sharoonthomas/trytond-mongodb>

    > > https://bitbucket.org/sharoonthomas/trytond-mongodb

    > >

    > > [5] <https://github.com/openlabs/magento>

    > > https://github.com/openlabs/magento

    > >

    > > [6] <https://github.com/openlabs/trytond-magento>

    > > https://github.com/openlabs/trytond-magento

    > >

    > > [7] <http://hg-git.github.com/>http://hg-git.github.com/

    > >

    > > --

    > > [email protected]
    <mailto:[email protected]> mailing list

    > >

    > > --

    > >

    > > [email protected]
    <mailto:[email protected]> mailing list


--
    Albert Cervera i Areny

    http://www.NaN-tic.com

    OpenERP Partners <http://www.NaN-tic.com>

    Tel: +34 93 553 18 03 <tel:%2B34%2093%20553%2018%2003>


    http://twitter.com/albertnan

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