Hi Jeff,
I can't resist to add inline some comments to Aditya's good answer
Le 30/07/2020 à 07:43, Aditya Sharma a écrit :
The confluence site is a web of confusion. For example
Thanks for raising the concerns. The community is striving to improve
the documentation. We have various documentation efforts going on with
Ascidocs etc, we will definitely try to improve the experience.
The AsciiDoc documentation is indeed a well advanced WIP. You may find more
information under
https://ci.apache.org/projects/ofbiz/site/
stable: current stable release documentation
next: next stable release documentation
trunk: : trunk documentation
We are not yet referring to it, but it will eventually be the official
documentation (hopefully before end of year)
they are in the confluence "Wiki Attic" breadcrumb. Which is confusing.
Here is the most recent example:
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/How+to+install+OFBiz+with+the+Demo+Data
When pages become outdated they are not deleted but moved to Attic.
Some references and indexes on search engines may still be there.
Those can still be useful for old users custom projects. OFBiz is 19 years
old...
I do believe that OFBiz can be a great backbone for my business
applications, but I have the following concerns:
- It will be difficult for developers to get acclimated to the project
based on the documentation and books as described above.
OFBiz has not fundamentally much changed since these books and documentation
were created.
It has mostly improved. Which mostly means, less bugs, more features, more and
better documentation, better code.
- With no recent "news" the project is stagnating and losing momentum
Not at all, the project is mature but still thriving in certain areas.
* Soon we will have REST, also for exporting services
* The ecommerce part is now using Boostrap for a better UI
* The code continue to improve in term of readability and
* ...
- The latest point release is from two weeks ago, but the major release
was from 2017
We have a conservative way of releasing. Most of the time, each year we freeze the trunk and create a release branch. One or more years after, we
release packages from this branch. We name this branch stable when its 1 packages is released. The previous one is then names old and is no longer
supported. This is reflected in demos, where the trunk (master if you prefer) is also available.
After the creation of a yearly branch, bugs fixed in trunk are backported to still supported branches (R17 and R18 are current examples). This ensures
stability (no regressions) and reliability (less bugs). Apart from community consensus, no important features are backported. Few trivial but safe and
worthy features may be backported, that's rare.
It happens that, for misc. reasons - security can be one, some years we don't freeze the trunk. This happened in 2019 where we received a lot of
security reports. Vulnerabilities are always backported to supported branches.
It also happens that, again for misc. reasons, some yearly branches are never
released, R14 and R15 are examples. That's also rare.
HTH
Jacques
