Le 03/09/2014 10:58, Taher Alkhateeb a écrit :
Hi Chloé,
We started a company with OFBiz being one of the main components in our
value proposition. We compared OFBiz at length with OpenERP and we
understand your frustration with their sort of restrictive management of
the project which was a big turn-off for us as well. I can highlight the
differences as follows:
OFBiz pros:
- Excellent domain model as you mentioned based on a very well thought book
by Len Silverston
- Easy to quickly dive under the hood. The code is just accessible and
understandable.
- Design is well thought, flexible, and independent of programming
languages and operating systems (just a JVM framework). Python is a
beautiful language but it cannot act as a full operating environment like
the JVM does.
- Robust, solid and battle-tested.
- Real open community and by observing their work I would very smart people
too!
OFBiz cons:
- The user interface is just ugly in comparison with OpenERP. You can
overcome that by working for a while on themes and getting your CSS
resources right.
- Steep learning curve (at least for me) .. it took me a while before I got
comfortable with the framework.
- I would not say documentation for OFBiz is scarce, but rather scattered.
It's not well organized into one nice document that comes bundled with each
release for example. You have to dig in between the wiki, the JIRAs, other
websites and derivative projects. I found a lot of material, but it just
took me a while to find it.
If we had to redo the exercise after what we learned we would still choose
OFBiz hands down, but the learning curve is still an issue.
Thanks Taher,
it's now a week I boil waiting to grab enough continuous time with a fresh mind to help Ron and Sharan. They are refactoring the wiki to improve not
only the content of the documentation but also its organisation which we all agree is bad.
Then you (I) find that creating, and especially organising, a documentation for a tool like OFBiz is not as easy as reviewing a couple of patches and
commit them (at least it's quite different). I guess, one of the reasons, we are in this situation.
Jacques
My 2 cents if it helps
Taher Alkhateeb
On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 10:55 AM, Nicolas Malin <
[email protected]> wrote:
Hello Chloé,
Thanks for your feedback.
You have an official list here https://cwiki.apache.org/
confluence/display/OFBIZ/Apache+OFBiz+User+List.
For the documentation, a contributor group work on refresh it.
Currently, at Nereide we deploy OFBiz on international trade projet. If
you want you can contact me directly in french.
Have a nice days,
Nicolas
Le 03/09/2014 09:33, Chloé Desoutter a écrit :
Hello,
We're a F/OSS company looking at what exists in the ERP sector. We
have internal needs and we have business development needs.
We have been using OpenERP for a while but are quite dissatisfied with
several points :
- Its database schemas are just unreadable w/o the app, so we are
bound to using its web services only and cannot migrate data without
writing magic glue code.
- They have a policy of nagging for registration that displeases us a
lot : end users don't need to see a Piracy-warning-like message on F/OSS.
- It's so tightly bound to the database that it's not possible to
migrate it to another way of storing the data.
- It's not "real Open Source" as it is an Affero GPL product. This
means that whatever we do will eventually be owned by the central
company.
OFBiz is at the opposite of these points : its DB schemas are based on
standards, it doesn't have a central authority that wants your money,
it's licensed under a permissive license, and it can already manage to
live in lots of database.
But we need to know who uses OFbiz and how? Who can we make new
business with? Who already makes business with it? Is there room for
new experts?
The documentation is scarce and except if we buy books online (written
for outdated versions) it will be a guessing game to know what it is.
Where can we get the fresh news and status of the project?
Yours sincerely
