On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 12:36 PM, Todd Thorner <tthor...@infotinuum.com>wrote:
Thank you, Mr. Byers, for posting such a remark-worthy suggestion, and
thank you, Mr. Rosser, for providing the inertia that might help start
an exciting new OFBiz-related project (congrats as well on securing a
happy jeweler client).
I would be an enthusiastic participant in any documentation project
whose outcome helped business managers become dedicated OFBiz end users.
Indeed, I am one such hopeful business manager, excited by the prospect
of having OFBiz at the core of my transactional processes, daunted by
the IT learning curve.
I am by trade a tech writer with over 15 years of experience, mostly
doing API docs for SDK products. I also have a Fine Arts degree in
Creative Writing, and those two properties combined make me one of the
most sought-after writers in the Vancouver IT industry. I am, though,
as I said, now working on becoming a successful business owner.
From my perspective, this might be a proverbial golden opportunity. I
would learn a lot and move up that learning curve, plus I have much to
offer those who seek to improve OFBiz documentation and attract more
CFOs & CMOs to the product.
I ask the community how a prospective team might start a workflow (Agile
or whatever) for such a project. Would a focal point of managing
productivity be JIRA or something like that? Is there an
eat-the-dog-food instance of OFBiz out there allowing authorized
contributors to use its Scrum functionality? Maybe even its CMS
interface? I would love to help make OFBiz compatible with any
arbitrary CMIS-compliant product, but that's just me...
Thanks for everything that everyone does to make this product world-class.
You're welcome Todd,
I don't have a specific answer for the questions you raise. I generally go
with whatever works with the team with whom I am working at the time.
My priority, right now, is to first learn how to set up a multi-tenant
installation of OFBiz, as well as a multi-site installation of wordpress;
and then how to integrate the two so that OFBiz's ecommerce component can
be used to handle payment for subscriptions to the contents on one or more
of the sites in the Wordpress installation. I'd also want to be able to
support use of, the relevant back office components (e.g. the accounting),
for a venture that is focused on publishing.
I then want to install Redmine, in order to be able to exploit it's project
management features (including issue/bug tracking). I have not yet begun
to see to what extent Redmine's capabilities are complementary to OFBiz's
capabilities or how much overlap there may be, e.g., WRT the work effort
components). While Redmine, itself, integrates into a couple version
control products (notably Subversion), it does not seem to have, as far as
I can tell, support for any of the UML diagrams. What I am keeping an eye
out for is an open source product that both relates each UML diagram (such
as a use case scenario) to one or more items on a wish list (easily created
in Redmine), as well as relating each use case diagram to the code that
implements it. Do you, or anyone else, know of an open source product that
supports UML documentation, that could be integrated with Redmine? One
that can construct a suite of UML documents given a codebase (and that can
be used to construct a complete set of UML diagrams, or at least use case
and E-R diagrams, for OFBiz, WordPress and Redmine), would be particularly
useful as that could automatically provide core design documentation, and
the use case documents could be used both to provide feature lists and a
suite of howto documents. Is there any automated tool to make the
documentation task easier?
One of the things that makes this especially daunting is that OFBiz is Java
while Wordpress is PHP and Redmine is Ruby. And there are a few features
that do not seem to exist that I would probably implement in a mix of Perl
and C++. Integration of web apps involving such a mix of languages is
something I have not yet tried (all the web apps I have developed have been
either entirely Perl (with JavaScript on the client side) or a mix of Java
Servlets+JSP/JSF, so I am unsure of how to integrate two apps that use very
different technologies, and especially how to maintain session info in that
effort.
Cheers,
Ted
