On Nov 13, 2009, at 8:35 AM, Ruth Hoffman wrote:
Hi All:
As I sit back here and read the many an various opinions about the
current state and future of OFBiz, I have to say I really appreciate
everyone taking the time to voice an opinion. Maybe David will take
this to heart and factor all this into his OFBiz lite project.
I haven't read that entire thread yet... saving for a nice evening to
enjoy by the fire... if only I had a fireplace... hopefully it'll be
entertaining enough without.
In any case, I think you're referring to the EZBiz effort, and for
that effort I hope others will get involved or at least speak up if
they want it to be a certain way. Now is the time to do so as the
design is still young and no implementation has started.
Concerning competing interests, I didn't intend that comment in a
"mean" way. I think it is good that there is so much interest in
OFBiz. Naturally with a project as multi-faceted as this, there will
be various special interests that evolve. I think that is a good
thing.
Competing interests are a good thing. Some might complain that their
interests are not adequately represented in the project. If that is
the case then it means they have not contributed enough for their
interests to be represented, which implies that the benefit they do
get from the project is thanks to those with differing interests, and
gratitude is in order.
Perhaps a better way to say this is that I would like to see, and I
think several others on the list have expressed a special interest
in, taking the OFBiz framework (and what exactly is included in the
framework should be discussed) and making it a separate "something"
- so that it can get all the care and attention it deserves.
I don't know what that "something" is. Someone with more experience
working in this type of development environment could help with that
definition. A goal similar to the Eclipse plug and play model sounds
really attractive to me. How to get there? I don't know.
As Jacopo commented this has been discussed many times over the years,
and the framework can be used pretty independently right now (I know
there are a few groups who are doing just that).
We could fairly easily do a framework-only build like we do with the
trunk, release09.04, and release4.0 builds on http://build.ofbiz.org/.
To make it truly separate we would want to have it live in a separate
place in SVN, and only include binaries plus scripts/config/etc in the
OFBiz applications project. That step would require a significant
amount of additional work and inconvenience, and frankly I don't think
we have sufficient interest in investing in that sort of thing to make
it happen without making things more difficult and cumbersome for
current users and contributors who are not so interested in that
happening.
Just my $0.02, which with inflation would be about $0.00091 in
original US dollars (using gold as an inflation marker since those
responsible for US inflation won't give us the real number...), and
take it while you can since the value my of 2 cents is going down
fairly quickly! ;)
-David
