Considering OFBiz for a new project...

[pearl865j]

Hello OFBiz,

I am currently in the early stages of project research and wanted to solicit a little feedback from the community. I am taking an early pass at the high-level, considering complete system architecture. I have spent the day today reviewing a lot of the OFBiz documentation, tutorials, and even a few screencasts. Thus far, I am encouraged with what I have seen.

I am going for an Agile SOA approach starting with business core services such as ERP and WMS and working out to multi-channel e-commerce and POS concerns. I have a few questions...

I have spent the past few weeks getting up to speed with BPML and BPEL and have become very interested in the Intalio approach to BPMS. I understand OFBiz has its own integrated process engine. Is it BPML capable? Is process abstracted or built into the workflow directly? Could someone compare/contrast the OFBiz business process lifecycle versus the Intalio? Are they compatible?

Are Xforms a possibility within the workflow?

Also, has anyone successfully integrated the Alfresco CMS or Liferay portal solutions with OFBiz?

Lastly,I am going for an AJAXy cart solution. All of the cart examples I have seen today seem very similar and not exactly what I am thinking about. How customizable is the cart functionality? Specifically, one cart requirement is to minimize redirection while shopping. We need to avoid the "add to cart" button concept (think gap.com). Is this possible with the OFBiz cart?

Thank you in advance for the feedback.


Regards,

John

[Shi Jinghai]

> I have spent the past few weeks getting up to speed with BPML and BPEL and
> have become very interested in the Intalio approach to BPMS. I understand
> OFBiz has its own integrated process engine. Is it BPML capable? Is process
> abstracted or built into the workflow directly? Could someone
> compare/contrast the OFBiz business process lifecycle versus the Intalio?
> Are they compatible?
No. As I googled, Intalio is process oriented. OFBiz is resource
oriented.

> Are Xforms a possibility within the workflow?
Don't know. You have to change your mind from process to resource.

> Also, has anyone successfully integrated the Alfresco CMS or Liferay portal
> solutions with OFBiz?
We have integrated OFBiz with OpenCms successfully. OpenCms as frontend
and OFBiz as the backoffice of the commerce.
It should be no problem to integrate the Alfresco CMS and Liferay
portal. Just use the OFBiz services.

> Lastly,I am going for an AJAXy cart solution. All of the cart examples I
> have seen today seem very similar and not exactly what I am thinking about.
> How customizable is the cart functionality? Specifically, one cart
> requirement is to minimize redirection while shopping. We need to avoid the
> "add to cart" button concept (think gap.com). Is this possible with the
> OFBiz cart?
I guess you should implement your cart outside OFBiz. The ecommerce part
of OFBiz is a sample only. You may consider it as a specialpurpose
module or a hotdeploy module.

Regards,

Shi Jinghai/Beijing Langhua Ltd.

[Cameron Smith-6]

Hi, to respond to your questions about SOA and
workflow (based on my own experience).

1. SOA. OFBiz would indeed be compatible with an SOA
as it provides you with an easy way to expose pretty
much any functionality as services, which can be
exported as SOAP services very easily.

OFBiz also helps you manage the transactionality,
interfaces, and interdependencies of your services.

Most of the existing business functionality in the
OFBiz built-in modules (accounting, ecommerce) etc, is
exposed as services.

2. Workflow.  OFBiz workflow support is/was based on
the Shark workflow engine (shark.enhydra.org), but I
do not believe it ever reached a fully functional
state.  And now, in the default OFBiz configuration,
it is disabled.  Therefore I consider it effectively
defunct (please jump in and correct me here, people,
if am wrong!).

About 18 months ago I seriously considered using Shark
(outside of OFBiz) for a workflow-intensive product.
It had a nice graphical editor for XPDL, but poor
documentation and poorly documented code.  This made
it difficult to integrate into the rest of the
application (especially user-task mapping).  After
several days of fighting with its API I gave up (it is
one of the very few libraries I have given up on in my
life!).

I went for a simpler alternative, OS Workflow
(http://www.opensymphony.com/osworkflow/) and have
been very happy for that, it does what it says on the
tin and is enormously flexible.  Atlassian JIRA uses
this for its workflow control too.   However please
note that OS Workflow is NOT a product directly
comparable to Intalio or Shark.

It does NOT provide an easy way for "business process"
experts to remodel core business logic on the fly via
cute graphical interface (personally, I believe that
this does not happen nearly as much as BPMS vendors
would have you believe).

It DOES allow your developers with a set of tables,
Java APIs and and an XML configuration language so
that they can treat workflows as a first class entity
- that  is, create a "process-oriented" system.

Now, returning to OFBiz, its data model does provide
all the basic entities for modelling a workflow, and
pretty much ALL of its business entities, provide for
the control of status and history information.

So, if you wanted to have a functional workflow module
integrated with OFBiz,  you would not be starting from
scratch but perhaps from 50%.   Now that Intalio has
gone Open Source, it /might/ a viable alternative to
Shark.

However I notice from its Community License that...
 a. It has some restrictions on production use
although I could not see what these are
 b. You can only use it with Derby or MySQL (so for
instance Oracle or PostgresSQL would be out).
 c. You can only download the code in object form,
which is a rather bizarre Open Source license (free as
in beer and not as in speech!!).

Anyway, I would be interested to hear how you get on,
cameron

cameron


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