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.
