I would concur with the general thoughts in this thread.
The focus of Magento is eCommerce, with some back-end fulfillment stuff
for managing customers / orders / inventory etc. We haven't used Magento
-- it obviously works otherwise there wouldn't be so many Magento based
sites. I have heard anecdotal evidence to support the problems noted by
others.
OFBiz provides an outstanding data model, a comprehensive service layer,
and complete functionality for a full-blown ERP solution. eCommerce is
obviously part of this. The out-of-the-box UI does not pretend to be
elegant and ready-to-go. For us it's almost a reference implementation
meant to be tweaked. The heavy lifting is all under the covers. And it
does it well.
The LAMP vs Java debate is another obvious differentiator. For us it's
easy, we're a Java shop. We build enterprise, mission-critical systems
and Java based apps does it for us.
I do find it interesting that most of the queries to this ML are related
to eComm. This is what motivated us to build our BigFish solution
(easy-to-use, out-of-the-box eCommerce solution by extending the great
features of OFBiz). Check out http://bigfish.solveda.com (wait for the
new release in the next couple of weeks, some significant improvements
on the way).
Great to see that OFBiz is being extended in many different ways with
out-of-the-box offerings from various providers, good news for the
future longevity of OFBiz.
On 10/19/2013 12:07 PM, Jacques Le Roux wrote:
Antony Adopo wrote:
For users customers first. but we have to be able to personnalize a
maximum. about our different shops on different places. and i'm not good at
php
I just want to add to Paul's answer, that if you need to handle PHP requests in
Java this could interest you
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-4203
But it seems that you need more to convince your boss, and it's helpess for
that, maybe to negotiate something
Maybe the best is indeed to wait for http://www.cato-commerce.com/
For now it's a closed beta with select customers
The demo exists but isn't there for a larger audience
HTH
Jacques
Paul Piper wrote:
I would second the opinion that it absolutely depends on the purpose and more
importantly the size of the company. If the goal is to get an ecommerce
store up and running quickly magento is currently the better choice, as it
is easier to find proper themes for it. So if you have a limited budget and
are fine with the features magento offers, go for it.
But that is where the benefits end. Having implemented several stores with
both magento or OFBizi must say that feature-wise OFBiz is superior. At
least once you replace the html and trim it down (as we did with
www.syracus.net). Magento hasn't been updated in recent years - in fact,
people are still waiting for version 2.0 to come out. If you actually do the
switch you will find that Magento is actually pretty buggy (give the product
csv import a go and you will see what i mean) and it isn't necessarily more
comfortable to deal with once set up. There is a SAAS based version of
Magento available, which isn't to expensive to use - if you want to give it
a try, I'd suggest to look at it there, and you'll see what i mean when I
say "buggy". On top, it is a php based software, so "combining" both will
result in you having to develop a webservice based API through which either
systems communicate. I can tell from experience that this isn't an ideal way
to handle any system and has severe limitations.
So to summarize: Magento isn't a bad system and has its usefulness in
smaller-scale ecommerce setups. If you have to deal with more complex
business processes or want to modify the store beyond the themes, I'd
suggest to stick with OFBiz and rather look into a more modern webstorefront
(almost all agencies have one) and/or wait for www.cato-commerce.com to come
out, which will solve the problem of not having a nice interface for a
complex solution.
