Thanks David,
It's a long way to convince people
Jacques
From: "David E Jones" <d...@me.com>
James,
There is a difference between the design of a screen and the tools used to implement it. The generic screens in OFBiz in the
business applications layer are meant to be just that: generic. They are not designed around any particular business process
because there are SO many different possible business processes, and the more unique yours is, the greater the chance that custom
screens will be required to meet the needs of your intended users.
This is not rare for OFBiz, or for business applications in general. In fact, this is EXACTLY the situation that the OFBiz
framework, and many of the generic business application artifacts, are meant for. These sorts of generic screens are far easier to
reuse than very custom screens would be, and depending on your needs some may be far easier than building screens from scratch (ie
from just data model and services).
What you are proposing is a layer of Java objects to represent the data model, and a tool (Wicket) to use Java objects to
represent the UI. That is a preference for Java objects, it is just a different technology. It has nothing to do with what the
resulting UI will be like... that is simply a result of designing what you want, and then implementing it. In other words,
technology bias has little to do with user interface design.
If you give the OFBiz framework a chance as-is I'm sure you'll find that what you develop will be better organized, easier to
maintain, and the artifacts will be easier to reuse. This is even more true with a certain next generation framework
(www.moqui.org) that is based on many ideas in the OFBiz framework, but with a number of key differences and in general totally
rethought and rewritten.
Either way, the approach is not object-oriented for the business-level artifacts. That is intentional. Objects are great for
implementing certain things, but for business development it tends to result in massive amounts of poorly organized and highly
redundant code. This seems to be more true the larger the team gets, and is true even when writing things that extend OFBiz when
the recommended tools and practices are not used. One extreme example of this I've seen is a case where over 500,000 lines of Java
were written, just for an ecommerce application with around 20 screens. The bulk of the problem was that there were 100 developers
who were given license to develop in their preferred way and few of them learned about the tools and practices and reusable
artifacts that could save them time and money.
So yes, you'll find bias against object-mapping here. What's the point in mapping everything to objects, especially things that do
not naturally have an object-like structure? Why do object-relational mapping, object-service mapping, object-html mapping,
object-everything mapping when you could just use the relational, service, html, etc concepts more directly?
And yes, that concept applies no matter what kind of fancy clothing you try to put on that pig. By fancy clothing I mean things
like annotations, inversion of control, and so on. A pig is a pig, and using objects for everything is inefficient, redundant,
self-obfuscating, bloated, messy, and inflexible.
-David
On Jan 24, 2011, at 9:24 AM, james_sg wrote:
Hi Jacques,
Let me put it another way. I don't think this patch is good as it doesn't
reuse the screen definition.
Before any improvement can be made to use the screen definition, OFBiz
should understand why a layer of POJOs should exist between the screen
definition and renderers.
Why this component?
My client handles numerous orders each day. Each order have hundreds of
items. Their existing desktop based ERP system supports the order clerks
with that requirement efficiently. Now they want to move to web-based.
Many OFBiz's forms are based on the tables instead of business objects. This
mean the user have to click here and there in order to edit the forms. More
clicking means less efficiency.
This component was quickly put up so that I can rework the code to support
forms based on business object. That means having the request header,
request items etc on the same screen.
Regards,
James
Jacques Le Roux wrote:
James,
It's quite clear, and IMO you did an excellent and interesting work.
Unfortunately, I don't know if we will find enough interest in
the community to commit your patch. Mostly because it's a bit redundant
and not exactly in the spirit of OFBiz (less compilations
and reboots).
BTW why was the reason you created this component (apart that maybe you
are a huge fan of wicket ;o), did you miss something in
OFBiz?
Thanks
Jacques
From: "james_sg" <snowme...@hotmail.com>
Hi Jacques,
Ok, I agree one con about it, is maintenance.
The reason is because the screen renderer in OFBiz is tightly coupled
with
the screen definition.
Since this implementation is a quick hack, I go with the easier way of
coding the screen content in java instead of using the screen definition
way.
It will be good if OFbiz add a layer of POJOs between screen widgets and
the
renderer.
Hope I am clear.
Regards,
james
Jacques Le Roux wrote:
Hi devs,
James yong submitted a patch (simple enough to be quickly read)
proposing
to introduce Wicket as an OFBiz framework component. I's
be interested to read your comments about pros and cons
Note the urlrewrite stuff...
One cons I see is maintenance... (We will see if James is still around,
he
created the Jira issue in August)
Thanks
Jacques
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