Re: Having a spot to Park/Publish components

[sandy <sa...@gmail.com>]

I am new to this mailing list and more of an user than a developer of 
ofbiz at this time. Nevertheless this thread sounded very interesting 
particularly more so as I have some familiarity with the Drupal 
community which has benefited immensely from all the contributed 
modules. In fact it is hard to find any Drupal site not using a  bunch 
of contributed modules. Now the comparison may be fair as Drupal was 
kind of designed with 'callbacks' in mind - will not debate whether it 
is good or bad from an architecture standpoint, but the success clearly 
points at the ability to not just have addons or extensions, but also 
have ways to modify behavior of existing modules or even core Drupal 
without code changes in them . This is immensely useful as most Drupal 
developers would agree, for no longer one has to keep worrying about 
keeping the core code in sync with the community and your own changes.  
Besides of  course  the advantage of extending the functionality in many 
ways that can be considered reusable for some situations.

In ofbiz parlance perhaps this would mean ability to override and add 
fields to certain screens, include screen lets, override permissions and 
roles etc, if one were to just look at plugins or addons to customize 
the default behavior within reasonable limits. New functionality 
extensions can be of flavor such as auctions, ecommerce enhancements for 
example 360deg views of products, country specific VAT extensions and 
many more.. Themes can be another set of contributed customizations. 
Given the nature of ofbiz as a ERP framework, industry specific 
contributions such as seed data, workflow etc may also make sense for some.

While all of these seem possible even today in some ways - like host the 
code somewhere else (assuming many of these won't make sense to be 
incorporated in the core apps), it is definitely going to be very useful 
to have a integrated contribution setup within ofbiz site much like the 
way Drupal has under Drupal projects.

My 2 cents..

Sandy

David E Jones wrote:
>
> On Nov 24, 2008, at 8:22 PM, Anil Patel wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>> I think it will be good to have a spot on Ofbiz site that acts as 
>> catalog of application available for deployment on ofbiz. There are 
>> various custom applications that people write that can be shared 
>> (they will like to) with community. Sometime for people don't do it 
>> because they can't figure out how and other times they wonder how 
>> community will react to it (I am one of those). I understand that we 
>> cannot keep adding custom stuff to ofbiz trunk. At the same time I 
>> have strong feeling that Generic applications find less users because 
>> they are hard to use.
>
> I don't think anyone is against having "custom" applications in OFBiz, 
> in fact that's what the specialpurpose set of applications is all 
> about (unless I misunderstand what you mean by "custom").
>
> If you're referring to comments earlier today about the IS asset 
> manager application, I think those were just suggestions to improve 
> what you're working on (and perhaps to head off what will probably 
> happen in the future, ie natural consolidation and reorganization of 
> apps after more design and review and such is done).
>
>> Most of other open source CRM/ERP have a market place/ catalog where 
>> people post their own little applications. I think we should do 
>> something on those lines. This can be easily achieved by creating a 
>> page on Confluence and have people list their app on it. In the 
>> summary there can be a link to another page that has details of that 
>> application and custom component can be attached to this page.
>
> Do you some examples of these sharing/marketplace type things? We may 
> have to adapt ideas to work better in a community-driven setting, but 
> they might be nice to look at for ideas.
>
> -David
>