Hi Pierre, By your inquiry on the future, do you mean with specific features in the applications or how they work together?
As an architect, I am interested in not just an ability to integrate my application against OFBiz, but allow my application to take part in message orchestration by patching itself into the workflows. I should like that a stock OFBiz deployment can be customized through open interfaces with now-common enterprise integration patterns instead of requiring a proprietary (if open) means of application customization. Apache Ode, ServiceMix and the W3C WS stacks may not be the way to go, but I think the "major moving parts" of that model might provide a good pattern for how the applications could work together in the future. (In other words, Mule might be preferred, but the applications still remodeled on EIP for open integration). If the applications integrated this way and were uncoupled into separate Maven projects, the applications would also be usable individually where appropriate. It would be a challenge to do this, but a new class of user would result, one that could pick and choose applications that they wanted to integrate against their local deployment instead of the current all-or-nothing approach. ServiceMix has some rather comprehensive integrations with Maven in this regard which I don't pretend to understand very well, but a team effort might result in a solution that really reinvigorates the ecosystem through a large number of new use cases of existing applications. For instance, REST style or WS interfaces might open the applications to use by Ruby or PHP developers. The depth and experience wrapped up in the OFBiz ecosystem is staggering, but it's reach is limited by it's rather monolithic Java-centric deployment. If opening it up in this way would significantly alter the user base, there would be a lot more opportunities for everyone involved. I am not trolling here, so please excuse if what I am writing is naive. I do not have enough technical chops on the guts of OFBiz to know what toes I am stepping on, just presenting a vision of what I would like to integrate against. I did investigate OFBiz for an ERP solution I need to deliver in the retail space and found that it would be challenging to use the user interface facilities I found to create the customer UI. My solution was to avoid the problem by building my web UI in a message-oriented manner, back it by Mule, and push the problem out to the future. It's not a question for me of whether OFBiz will be there when I need it, but more that I will integrate against the applications with standard EIP. If OFBiz had an accessible EIP presentation like this, it would be a natural choice to integrate with, both for me, and I suspect many other people in my situation. The Ode style orchestration is more about the applications working together, which would be gravy on the meal. $0.02... Brian
