Alex,
We're big fans of Ruby on Rails here and would *love* to see a rails
- OFBiz/opentaps integration. I think SOAP is the right way to go.
I think you would just modify the services.xml and add an
export="true" and OFBiz would turn it on for you. I'd love to see
what kind of front end you come up with.
Where I'm a little concerned with your idea is the order part--are
you going to create a whole order entry capability in Rails? That
could be quite a bit of work. The OFBiz shopping cart is not a
service but a Java object. Would you need to access that? I guess
it'd help to get a little more detail.
A FedEx shipping manager would be great. We'll try to help out in
our copious spare time.
Si
On Aug 4, 2006, at 1:49 AM, Alex Caudill wrote:
Firstly, thanks for contributing this fantastic piece of software
to the
global community. If it were proprietary, I would literally be a
bit poorer
now.
I'm working on the software for an order fulfillment company. Ofbiz
seems
like the best starting point, but the lack of multi-tenancy support is
somewhat troublesome.
To clarify, an order fulfillment company in this context means
a company that fulfills orders for other companies (clients, in our
nomenclature). Clients have orders associated with them, and
naturally
there is a fairly complex pricing structure. OFBiz seems ready to
deal with
this sort of association.
My main issue is product management and order entry on a per-client
basis.
My first thought was to write a front-end to OpenTaps using Ruby on
Rails.
The idea is, when we get a new client, we use the OFBiz party
manager to
create a party classification group, and create a new
other_organization
party called "Fulfillment Client". Then, we add to this party a
user with web service access.
Each instance of a shipment, arrival, and order will have to then be
associated with a Fulfillment Client.
I then create a set of Ruby on Rails models to speak with OFBiz via
SOAP, and implement a very straightforward interface for order and
product management.
Does this seem insane?
Where can I find, or how can I generate, WSDL files?
Is there any documentation on this?
Any thoughts, suggestions, links to good reading material?
I'm also working on code to integrate OpenTaps with the FedEx Ship
Manager
Server (to automate the printing of shipping labels and pricing,
sadly Win32
only but it should also work with their web API), and I'd like to
contribute
this back to the community under the Apache license. It's in a
rough state
at the moment, I haven't actually set up the Ship Manager Server so
I can't
test it yet, but I think I got it mostly right. If anyone is
interested in
having a look at this, let me know and I'll send it to you.
Thanks again!
P.S. Yes, it's 4am, please disregard any percieved senility, thanks =)
