I agree with both of you.
The recent FinAccount deadlock issue reported on dev ML is one example of the type of issues which would be easier to deal with with a Turing complete
language or at least a better DSL.
My 2 cts
Jacques
Le 18/02/2017 à 10:25, Taher Alkhateeb a écrit :
+1
let's maintain but not add more to the pile, and try to replace everything
written in minilang with other languages over time. I think your arguments
and proposal are well founded and would really improve the health of this
project.
On Feb 18, 2017 12:17 PM, "Michael Brohl" <michael.br...@ecomify.de> wrote:
Hi everyone,
we are currently working hard to make OFBiz a modern, quality, robust and
easy to use framework.
There are several ongoing initiatives like refactoring the core, UX,
changing the build and plugin system and cleaning up the javadocs, only to
mention a few.
In mini lang I see another part of our project which needs a
refactoring/change. Here are some reasons:
- Programming in XML is hard to deal with when it comes to refactoring.
- The "code" cannot be debugged and is hard to review and maintain.
- It is slower because of the overhead of parsing and processing XML
documents
- It is highly verbose, even so more than Java!
- It is difficult to reason about because everything appears as a string
(variables, maps, objects, etc ...) which makes it very difficult to know
where something was declared or modified
- It is highly error prone and brittle (again due to string declarations)
- It is not a full programming language (unlike groovy, or any other
language that supports a DSL). Thus it has many limitations that forces the
developer to write many more lines of code to achieve the same result.
- The code is not reusable (limitation of the DSL)
- The code is not composable (limitation of the DSL)
- Minilang depends on a lot of Java constructs (implementations, not
interfaces) that require refactoring, making any improvements to the core
API more challenging
- Minilang is used inconsistently (different DSL in widgets, services and
entities). Hence, we need to keep only a minimal DSL to declare things only.
We already have Java based implementations for services and events and
there are ideas to implement a Groovy DSL which can be used as easy (or
easier) as mini lang and does not have the above mentioned flaws.
I therefore like to propose to deprecate the mini lang implementation
which means:
1. there will be no new implementations based on mini lang accepted to go
into the code base.
2. mini lang and mini lang code will be maintained with bug and security
fixes for backwards compatibility and to support existing adopters relying
on mini lang.
There will be no new features though.
3. we will continously replace the mini lang implementations with Java
and/or Groovy code. This will be another good opportunity for contributors
to engage in the project.
This will certainly be a longer process and we will not stop support for
mini lang but I think we should avoid to add more mini lang implementations
to the project.
What do you think?
Regards,
Michael
