Chris,
I saw Chris Howe's answer and hopefully that starts to shed some light on the way things work.
To supplement that, and backing up a little bit, there are two main dynamics that have an effect on this:
1. the inherent complexity of business processes, data structures, and variability between industries and companies
2. the nature of a community-driven open source projectWe can do, and have done, a lot with the OFBiz framework to simplify the technical side of business application development and to make the implementation artifacts closer to the results of analysis and design efforts.
That part of things is necessary for anything like OFBiz to have a chance at survival. With no corporate backing or investment everything that comes into OFBiz is contributed, and usually from individuals or very small businesses. The only way these entities can typically contribute is by leveraging OFBiz for client needs, and then when those needs go beyond what OFBiz offers to try to implement things in such a way that they can be added to the open source project.
With OFBiz it has been this way for the last 6 years, and it will always be this way. No one on the PMC (project management committee) has sufficient resources to fund major development efforts, so the community and project growth is structured according to what people can do and when they can do it. There just isn't an easy way around that.
If we were creating something simple, or something where the whole world agreed on one way of doing things it would be a lot easier, but that just isn't the nature of modern business. To make things more interesting, most users of OFBiz do a lot of customization that is specific to their business. The need for that is why they choose OFBiz in the first place. However, that also means that much of the effort goes into that and not back into OFBiz. In that way it is VERY different from many infrastructure level open source projects, even the community driven ones.
My take on it is rather different. Most of the business level functionality has been developed in the last 2.5 years, an I think what has been done in that time is nothing short of amazing, especially when the fact is the resources invested are probably just a few percent of what goes into development of a traditional commercial enterprise suite. That means that OFBiz has seen various millions of dollars of effort contributed to it over the years, but that doesn't compare to the hundreds of millions that go into major commercial systems.
-David On Feb 6, 2007, at 10:05 AM, Christopher Snow wrote:
I feel like I'm getting over the learning curve with ofbiz. It's very powerful and productive!However, I'm now confused that if it's so quick to develop, why does theapplication/functionality seem to grow quite slowly? Are most developers spending their time on improving the framework and not improving the bundled apps? Many thanks, Chris
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