another solution is to get people committed to a part of the code and
establish a communication form where all contribute.
This has worked well in a formal commercial enviorement. So even though
this is a community effort why can't we take from a commercial model
that works.
the Biggest piece I see missing is code review.
This, is by the ASF, suppose to be initiated by an annoucemtn of changes
to the code in the Dev list. I see a few use the announcement discuss
but not the majority.
=========================
BJ Freeman
Strategic Power Office with Supplier Automation
<http://www.businessesnetwork.com/automation/viewforum.php?f=52>
Specialtymarket.com <http://www.specialtymarket.com/>
Systems Integrator-- Glad to Assist
Chat Y! messenger: bjfr33man
Scott Gray sent the following on 1/27/2011 2:50 AM:
(With so many messages I don't have a good spot to say my short piece so here
will do)
IMO our problems will only increase with the size of the code base. Every time
a new feature is committed you have an additional potential audience that must
be kept happy and our ability to please everybody continues to decrease.
Unhappy people don't work well together so things just keep getting worse.
Solution? Decrease the size of the code base and included features and
increase the ability for the community to share contributions outside of the
ASF's repo. Decrease the load on the committers and let the rest of the
community put their money where their mouth is.
Some ideas (feasible or not):
- Pull out all of the themes except one and move each one to google code or
wherever if there is someone interested in looking after each one.
- Then do the same for the bulk of the special purpose apps.
- Separate the framework from the applications.
- Remove any framework features that aren't used by the applications or are of
relatively low value and allow them to be dropped in by users when they need
them.
- Perhaps even take another look at the possibility of reducing the
dependencies among the core apps and splitting them (I'd gladly welcome 100 new
committers to the humanres app because I have no interest in it).
- Turn the payment and shipping gateway implementations into drop in components
along with any other pieces of code that are suitable for extraction
- Investigate ways to allow plug-in modification of apps and implement
something (anything) that allows it.
Right now we have a gigantic project with a gateway of ~13 active committers
(23 total) who have day jobs to worry about along with reviewing (and fighting
about) commits (or just giving up on this responsibility), attempting to
improve the project and taking part in these (mostly pointless discussions) and
then keeping the rest of the community happy. Increasing the number of
committers just increases the potential for disagreement and then stagnation so
the only other option to reduce the code.
Give control of features and components to people who care about them and then
help users find them externally as they need them. Don't like the direction a
feature/component is taking? Fork it and compete.
Regards
Scott
On 27/01/2011, at 9:54 PM, Jacopo Cappellato wrote:
I have noticed some negative trends happening to us in the last (1-2) years:
* a dramatic decrease of design discussions and an increase in commits
* committers are often working for themselves and not for the greater good of the project
("if a customer pays me to do something then it will be also good for the
project")
* less peer reviews and mostly focused on formal aspects rather then
fundamental aspects of the contributions
* a decrease in the minimum quality level needed to make a commit "acceptable"
* a proliferation of "best practices" and "rules" in an attempt to improve the
quality of the commits
* a decay in the attitude and quality of discussions: attacks, critics and
fights instead of healthy discussions to learn from others and improve design
decisions
Of course I am focusing on bad things, to the good ones (yes, there are also
good ones) it is easier to adjust: however when the final result of our efforts
is that a person like David doesn't feel comfortable in contributing more then
I feel bad.
The primary goal of the PMC, and the community in general, should be that of
creating the perfect environment to facilitate contributions from people like
David, and limit/review/improve the contributions from other less blessed
contributors: it seems like all our efforts are obtaining the exact opposite
result.
Jacopo
On Jan 27, 2011, at 7:46 AM, David E Jones wrote:
I'll respond here to Adrian's comments below, and to what Raj and others have
written as well.
Backwards compatibility is a huge issue, but I suppose that is as much a
symptom as it is a disease in and of itself. The underlying issue is
bureaucracy.
If I wanted to spend all my time chatting with others and writing endlessly
about when to do things and what to do, and trying to recruit others to do
it... then OFBiz would be the perfect place for that. I did that for years, and
I'm happy with what has been done with OFBiz, but there came a point in time
where the whole bureaucratic trend became stronger than any single person's
ability to push for new or different things. That point in time was at least a
yeah and a half ago, and perhaps long earlier than that depending on how you
look at it.
Personally, I'd rather spend my time on more productive efforts, and do so in a
way that avoids this same bureaucratic mess in the future (like different
management style and keeping framework, data model, themes, and applications as
separate projects). This way not only I, but many people are free to work on
what they want to and not have to argue about every little thing they want to
do, or deal with constant complaints about every little thing they actually do.
Isn't separate and competing projects better than that everyone arguing and
having to agree on what to do? Well, I have good news! No matter how you (the
reader) answer that question, you have an option to fit your preferences.
-David
On Jan 25, 2011, at 8:45 PM, Adrian Crum wrote:
Many of the things listed here have been discussed, and as far as I can tell,
there is no objection to making those changes - we just need the manpower to do
it.
Item #7 has been discussed and there hasn't been any argument against that
change - except that it touches on the backwards-compatibility issue. And I'm
going to use this opportunity to address that issue.
Some of the changes mentioned here wouldn't affect any of my projects - because
I don't attempt to patch or modify the framework - I only build applications on
it. Other changes mentioned here would make application development easier.
The other day Ryan Foster described the backwards-compatibility talk as a
mantra. I view it as more of a straw man. Five days ago I posed this question
to the user mailing list:
"Would you, as an end user of OFBiz, knowing that the OFBiz project could be
improved greatly - but at the cost of some backward incompatibility - accept the changes?
If yes, how often would backwards-incompatible changes be acceptable?"
It is interesting to note that in a list of over 400 subscribers, no one has
replied.
The most vocal proponents of backwards-compatibility (in the framework) are a
few players who have modified the framework locally. As a community, do we
really want to allow those few members to stifle innovation?
Some users claimed the updated Flat Grey visual theme wasn't "backwards
compatible." What does that even mean? Some colors and background images were
changed - how is that backwards incompatible?
To be fair, I have been an advocate for backwards-compatibility. But that has
been for things that break application functionality.
At the least, there needs to be a compromise. At best, there needs to be
acceptance of the possibility of future versions that are not backwards
compatible with previous versions. That concept is not new or revolutionary -
it goes on in every software project, both open source and commercial.
David has some great ideas, but he feels compelled to start over from scratch
to implement them. From my perspective, that's a tragedy. One of the project's
founders feels the need to start another project as a last resort to make the
project he originally started better. Does that make sense?
I don't want to use Moqui. It's an unfinished framework controlled by one
person and it has no applications built around it. Bottom line - it's not an
option. What I want is Moqui's innovations in OFBiz.
I believe it's time we have a serious discussion about this. Users have
commented that there is no plan for OFBiz - what is planned for its future?
They're right. Maybe we should come up with some plans, or some kind of path to
the future.
I propose we put all the cards on the table. Where do we go from here? Continue
on our present path and have competing projects that improve on OFBiz
technology? Try to keep innovation in the project at the expense of some
backwards incompatibility? Maintain backwards compatibility by forking the
project to something new? Or have milestone versions that are clearly marketed
as backwards incompatible with previous milestone versions?
Lately, it seems many of the big players in the OFBiz developer community have been
absent on the mailing list. I understand that this is a volunteer community, but at the
same time, we all have a say, and that "say" depends on us saying *something.*
So, please say something.
-Adrian
On 1/25/2011 1:53 PM, David E Jones wrote:
On Jan 25, 2011, at 6:02 AM, Ruth Hoffman wrote:
On 1/25/11 2:06 AM, David E Jones wrote:
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.
David - you keep saying this..Please provide some examples of "cumbersome and
inconsistent" within the framework. And why not try and fix these? Instead of reinventing the
wheel. What "funny quirky" things have turned of prospective developers? Do you have an
specific examples?
Yes, I have mentioned these many times especially in the last 2-3 years. Some
of them I have tried to fix in OFBiz itself and ran into rather large problems.
These are not easy changes to make in a large and mature project like OFBiz,
and after trying a few times I decided that a new framework was the only way
forward (another thing I've written before and made very clear).
These are the things that led to many aspects of the design of Moqui, and the
best summary of them is the document I wrote about the differences between the
Moqui and OFBiz frameworks:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/moqui/forums/forum/1086127/topic/3597296
To sum up here are some of the major inconsistencies and annoyances in the
current OFBiz framework that bug me frequently while I'm developing:
1. XML actions are different in each widget and in the simple-methods; they
share some underlying code but there are so many differences
2. scriptlets and expressions are a messy combination of BeanShell, UEL, and
Groovy and keeping track of which is a pain, plus the Groovy syntax and
capabilities are SO much better than the others so I find myself almost always
using ${groovy:...} instead of the default, and in annoying places like the
form.field.@use-when attribute since it is always BeanShell I just use a set
action to prepare a boolean and then check it in the use-when (BeanShell is
HORRIBLE compared to groovy, especially when squeezed into XML attributes)
3. the controller.xml file gets HUGE for larger applications, and if split it
becomes harder to find requests and views; *Screen.xml files also tend to get
HUGE with large numbers of screens in them; both are not organized in the same
way as the application, also generally making things harder to find;
views/screens and requests don't define incoming parameters so when doing
request-redirect you have to specify the parameters to use in a larger number
of places
4. another on the topic of why so many files: service groups and simple-methods
are just XML, why not include them inline in the service definition (especially
for smaller services), and encourage fewer services per file
5. loading of artifacts is not very lazy, meaning lots of unused screens,
forms, services, entities and so on that are not used are loaded anyway; also
many artifacts are difficult to reload by cache clearing and so that has
limited support in OFBiz; this slows things down reloading lots of stuff in
development, and results in more resources used than needed in production
6. the deployment model of OFBiz is limited and the use of static fields for
initialization makes it difficult to deploy in other ways; there are few
init/destroy methods and object instances that would make more deployment
models easier and more flexible; also because of this it is difficult to get
data from other parts of the framework (for example the audit log stuff in the
OFBiz Entity Engine uses ThreadLocal variables to pass userLoginId and visitId
down since there is no other good way of doing it); in other words, the tools
don't share a context
7. no API for apps; the framework is made up of an enormous number of classes that follow a bunch
of different "patterns" (in quotes because the use of the term is generous) because of
various people "cleaning" things up over time (also in quotes because the use of the term
is generous), and there is no distinction between the API that apps are intended to use and the
internal implementation of that API; this has the nasty side effect of making it difficult to find
the object and method you want, AND it makes backward compatibility problems REALLY nasty because
it gets people believing that EVERY SINGLE object needs to ALWAYS be backward compatible... and
that results in more and more piles of trash code lying around over time, and all of that code and
differing patterns makes framework changes error-prone and unnecessarily difficult (and this is
true for some of the app code in OFBiz too)
I should get back to work... there's a short list anyway...
The trick is how to solve these without abandoning backward compatibility, and
requiring a refactor of much of the framework and then based on that the
updating of massive numbers of application artifacts... and that is just the
stuff in OFBiz itself... not including everything that everyone else has
written outside the project that they may want to update. And, ALL of that
would have to be retested. Plus, it would take so long to get all of this done
in a branch with huge numbers of changes while others are making incremental
changes in the trunk making it nearly impossible to merge the branch into the
trunk, so it would basically be a fork anyway...
-David
