I am new to this mailing list and more of an user than a developer of
ofbiz at this time. Nevertheless this thread sounded very interesting
particularly more so as I have some familiarity with the Drupal
community which has benefited immensely from all the contributed
modules. In fact it is hard to find any Drupal site not using a bunch
of contributed modules. Now the comparison may be fair as Drupal was
kind of designed with 'callbacks' in mind - will not debate whether it
is good or bad from an architecture standpoint, but the success clearly
points at the ability to not just have addons or extensions, but also
have ways to modify behavior of existing modules or even core Drupal
without code changes in them . This is immensely useful as most Drupal
developers would agree, for no longer one has to keep worrying about
keeping the core code in sync with the community and your own changes.
Besides of course the advantage of extending the functionality in many
ways that can be considered reusable for some situations.
In ofbiz parlance perhaps this would mean ability to override and add
fields to certain screens, include screen lets, override permissions and
roles etc, if one were to just look at plugins or addons to customize
the default behavior within reasonable limits. New functionality
extensions can be of flavor such as auctions, ecommerce enhancements for
example 360deg views of products, country specific VAT extensions and
many more.. Themes can be another set of contributed customizations.
Given the nature of ofbiz as a ERP framework, industry specific
contributions such as seed data, workflow etc may also make sense for some.
While all of these seem possible even today in some ways - like host the
code somewhere else (assuming many of these won't make sense to be
incorporated in the core apps), it is definitely going to be very useful
to have a integrated contribution setup within ofbiz site much like the
way Drupal has under Drupal projects.
My 2 cents..
Sandy
David E Jones wrote:
On Nov 24, 2008, at 8:22 PM, Anil Patel wrote:
Hi,
I think it will be good to have a spot on Ofbiz site that acts as
catalog of application available for deployment on ofbiz. There are
various custom applications that people write that can be shared
(they will like to) with community. Sometime for people don't do it
because they can't figure out how and other times they wonder how
community will react to it (I am one of those). I understand that we
cannot keep adding custom stuff to ofbiz trunk. At the same time I
have strong feeling that Generic applications find less users because
they are hard to use.
I don't think anyone is against having "custom" applications in OFBiz,
in fact that's what the specialpurpose set of applications is all
about (unless I misunderstand what you mean by "custom").
If you're referring to comments earlier today about the IS asset
manager application, I think those were just suggestions to improve
what you're working on (and perhaps to head off what will probably
happen in the future, ie natural consolidation and reorganization of
apps after more design and review and such is done).
Most of other open source CRM/ERP have a market place/ catalog where
people post their own little applications. I think we should do
something on those lines. This can be easily achieved by creating a
page on Confluence and have people list their app on it. In the
summary there can be a link to another page that has details of that
application and custom component can be attached to this page.
Do you some examples of these sharing/marketplace type things? We may
have to adapt ideas to work better in a community-driven setting, but
they might be nice to look at for ideas.
-David
