Very interesting threat indeed. As a developer I find Ofbiz hard to sell because it has no impact on the mass market where "cutting-edge" technologies rules it, like Struts was or Spring, Hibernate, etc are for example. Companies are demanding concrete skills to developers so it's obvious that developers tries to adjust to this market.
It's almost a year since I started a full time dedication in Ofbiz customization for my own company and I found it a very productive and very entertaining. I've learned a lot and I'm still learning, but for some reasons I have to seek for a job as a developer on a external company. Every interview I've done they weren't so exited when I said "I'm starting up a retail company and it's based on an ERP called Ofbiz". I almost dare to say that Ofbiz is unknown in the IT scenario in Spain. On the other hand OpenBravo for example it's more well-know because their alliances to the big companies, as David said, they rule the IT market in general. Another reason perhaps is the legislation adaptation and business process orientation to this country that makes OpenBravo easy to sell. I'm starting a new little project and I wanted to use the Ofbiz framework only. I'm aware about the efforts done to have this ready but in order keep updated my skills for this mass marketed IT companies so I finally decided to do it with GWT+Spring+Hibernate. I need to sell myself. Regards. On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 9:30 AM, Jacques Le Roux < jacques.le.r...@les7arts.com> wrote: > From: "David E Jones" <d...@me.com> > >> On Jan 24, 2011, at 9:20 PM, Adrian Crum wrote: >> >> >> Having said that, I believe some things in OFBiz could benefit from ORM. >>> Like a postal address for example. A postal address >>> entity could be supplied to an object factory to create a postal address >>> object. That object could have built-in behaviors - like >>> rendering itself correctly based on its locale. Or knowing its >>> geolocation. Little things like that might benefit from ORM, >>> >> >> Perhaps I am too set in my ways, but when I think of creating something >> generic to format an address I think of that as a UI-level >> thing, preferably represented in something as close to the UI as possible. >> >> Based on that I'd rather have an FTL macro (or a few for different output >> types, different preferred formats like one line versus >> many lines, etc), and when that doesn't fit then do a custom template >> based on the data itself. >> >> The last time I checked in on OpenTaps they seemed to be going in the >>> direction of ORM and DSL. Maybe there could be some lessons >>> learned from that. >>> >> >> Old habits die hard. I imagine that OpenTaps gets as much, or likely more, >> pressure to use "standard" technologies than OFBiz >> itself does. They have also had key developers from the very beginning >> that didn't like the patterns in the OFBiz Framework and >> they immediately started replacing it and writing new code using different >> tools. The result is quite an impressive pile of code >> and list of tools used (even larger than the amazingly bloated list for >> OFBiz!). >> >> For those who haven't spent much time developing with >> object-mapping-oriented tools and don't believe that they are more of a >> pain, by all means try a small project. Grab the JBoss Seam stack (for >> example) and try building the OFBiz Example application >> (the main parts of it anyway, not the various JS/etc demo screens that >> have been added more recently) with it (after reading the >> docs about recommended practices of course, make sure you know what they >> think of as a slick way to develop to be fair). >> >> I've worked with a number of people whose first exposure to enterprise app >> programming was with OFBiz and later had just such an >> experience, and the responses tend to be consistent in a way you can >> probably imagine. >> >> All of that said, now that Moqui is starting to take shape I find the >> OFBiz Framework to be cumbersome and inconsistent in many >> ways (things that are hard to fix, but that are not surprising given the >> pioneering history of the OFBiz Framework). Those funny >> quirky things are likely a turn-off to prospective developers and I'm >> hoping to remove that impediment to adopting the approach. >> > > It might be interesting to have a list of the principle issues you think > about.. > > Jacques > > -David >> >> >> > > -- ----- Jonatan Soto
