While reading the sentence "There are many people out there who don't
understand the Entity Engine", I felt a problem implied in it: There
are
absolutely much more people "out there", and I'm sure the OFBIZ project
want to attract them in. Why they keep on asking "Hibernate", "Spring",
etc, though? Are they all wrong?
In my opinion, the OFBIZ framework DID do a right thing - to provide
developers an integrated framework. What I mean is in OFBIZ, the
developer can define entity in one place and share the entity
definition
across different tiers, form persistence to presentation. This kind of
integration saved developers a lot from typings and preserved
consistency across different application tiers. But, this is not what
Entity Engine itself can provide. All gains come from the integration.
If we simply separate the OFBIZ entity engine into a stand alone ORM
like tool, I bet its not very attractive and only people familiar with
OFBIZ already will use it.
On the other hand, if there are another framework such as Grails that
can provide at least same level of cross tier integration ability,
while
leverage the sophisticated and WELL KNOWN technologies (such as
Hibernate/JPA for ORM, Spring for service tier component composition,
Spring MVC for view tier framework). Sounds a little bit attractive
than
"home made" every thing, isn't it?
Regards,
Miles.
On Thu, 2010-03-11 at 10:23 -0500, Ruth Hoffman wrote:
Hi David:
Nothing! I think this is an amazing piece of work. IMO, there are
many people out there who don't understand the Entity Engine value
proposition. That is why they keep asking for "Hibernate" etc.
Here's some things I'd consider as additions:
* Maybe making a separate component/webapp to manage the Entity
Engine. Take it out of WebTools.
* Include in that webapp any security/role management specific to
the Entity Engine.
* Entity Engine performance tools (or more information on how
to use
existing tools).
* Better backup tools (or more information on how to use existing
tools).
More to come...
Ruth
----------------------------------------------------
Find me on the web at http://www.myofbiz.com or Google keyword
"myofbiz"
[email protected]
David E Jones wrote:
If you could change anything about the data tier in OFBiz
(basically the Entity Engine), what would you change?
All comments are welcome. If there is another tool you'd like to
see used instead of the Entity Engine, please describe what you
like about it (like "I want to have an Java class for each table
in my database") instead of just mentioning the tool (like "let's
use Hibernate!").
Why am I asking? This topic comes up every once in a while, and
it's true that many suggestions never get enough support to
actually happen (or on further research it is decided that the
idea is not tenable), but brainstorming about them to get ideas in
the open is still a great thing. The history of OFBiz is full of
things like this where users and more casual contributors had
ideas and saw possibilities that others, even more involved
contributors, totally missed or never looked at that way. What I
think would be fun, and ultimately useful too, is to keep this
mostly to brainstorming and not do too much comparing of ideas.
BTW, if you want to brainstorm about another tier (ie the Logic or
UI tiers) please use the other threads on those. If you'd like to
discuss things that aren't specific to a tier look for the
"General" thread.
-David
