Thi is all great,
Put please ladies/gents don't get out of subject.
I still think the 1st step is to fix the bugs we know exist, are documented in Jira and even ready to be fixed with patches for
some.
Jacques
() ascii ribbon campaign against HTML e-mail
/\ www.asciiribbon.org
From: "Anil Patel" <anil.pa...@hotwaxmedia.com>
We do see some great Ideas around what is needed. There was lot of conversation on this topic in ApacheCon 2008 and then in 2009
(based on messages on list).
You will be surprised there is lot done. We have seen lot of activity in documenting business processes and end user
documentation.
More recently David proposed a simple system derived from Ofbiz that will
address needs of small business.
We have lot more Ofbiz technical contributors then Business process knowledge contributors. It will be really nice if people in
this part of community will step up. It will be nice if business users or power business users who are technical developers as
well started to take part of requirement documents and add to UBPL or EZBIZ effort.
If users can document their business processes needs, give some wireframe help then technical developers will be able to help map
them to OOTB features (Gap Analysis).
Unless we get real business requirements documents coming from user community
there is no way for us to fulfill them.
I hope you understand I am not asking anybody to break NDA or whatever.
Thanks and Regards
Anil Patel
HotWax Media Inc
Find us on the web at www.hotwaxmedia.com or Google Keyword "ofbiz"
On Dec 6, 2009, at 8:22 PM, Cimballi wrote:
Hi devs,
Here my opinion about the subject.
To make things clear, it makes about 3-4 month I am working with
OFBiz, using it to implement a project.
I thing one way to have more people involved in the project is to
lower the "difficulty level" required to understand OFBiz.
And for this there are several possbilities, and I will focus on two :
- modularize the project
- more functional documentation inside the source files
Modularize the project
I've seen this subject has already been discussed and I think it can
profit to the project in several points :
- more modules means less code in each module, which means modules are
eaiser to understand, which means more developer may be interesting to
participate to its development, test, ... There is at least one
obvious module which could be very interesting to externalize, it's
the entity engine. I don't know so much OFBiz architecture but I think
it should be possible to externalize this module and a lot of projects
totally different of OFBiz could be interesting in it, and so
potentially a lot more developers to maintain and enhance it.
- on another side, more modules would also make it easier to
distribute the issues, each developer specialized on a specific
module. Maybe it's already the case...
More functional documentation inside the source files
Here my feeling is that with OFBiz, you really requires both technical
and functional knowledge to understand how the project work. Some part
like the entity engine are purely technical, but the order module for
example is really functional, I mean, you need to know a lot about how
ordering works in a company to be able to use the module and even more
to custommize or propose enhancements to it. So, with more
documentation in the source files, like the XML entity files, and then
in the source code for example explaining what a method concretly does
may help a lot to understand OFBiz. It seems the link David sent about
UBML is about his.
Here is my feeling about OFBiz as a fresh developers. I try to
participate to the project at least by providing bug reports, I still
feel for away from providing patches ! :-)
Hope this will help you, devs, the project is already great, let's
make it more accessible !
Cimballi
