OFBiz-GWT Projects for bulding user interface with GWT

[David E. Jones-2]

On Mar 11, 2010, at 12:08 PM, Scott Gray wrote:

> On 11/03/2010, at 12:42 AM, David E Jones wrote:
>
>>
>> On Mar 11, 2010, at 12:12 AM, Scott Gray wrote:
>>
>>> On 10/03/2010, at 11:33 PM, Ean Schuessler wrote:
>>>
>>>> ----- "Scott Gray" wrote:
>>>>> I'm not sure about Google Maps but gmail doesn't use GWT.
>>>>
>>>> That's weird. If you google "gwt" the summary record in the google results says " Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers". Looking further, however, I see several other people saying definitively that Gmail is not GWT. The GWT page says some definitive things about what *is* written in GWT (Wave, AdWords) but not so much about what is *not*. Google should do something about that nasty disinformation.
>>>>
>>>> I also have genuinely used and experienced the portability of GWT and it is quite real. I know I also saw an interview with the Rasmussen Brothers where they went off about how much porting effort GWT saved them on Google Wave and they were the guys who wrote Google Maps. I'm now curious to read a straight answer on where Google is actually using it.
>>>
>>> Just to clarify I don't know anywhere near enough about GWT to make a comment, except to say that when I had to do some work on opentaps it took forever to compile and I regularly got the "A script in this page is taking a long time to load, would you like to abort?" warning from the browser.  I didn't actually deal with any GWT code.
>>
>> This is an interesting perspective. Is it possible that this is caused by the way opentaps uses GWT and that using it in better ways might produce a better developer and user experience (like precompiled parameterized widgets, so that there is a single set of GWT classes shared by all screens/forms/etc)?
>
> That is certainly a possibility, as I mentioned I don't know enough about GWT to comment.
>
>>> As always there are a million great libraries but until some analysis is done we'll never find the one that might remove the UI framework burden from OFBiz.  For example, I think Apache Cocoon has some interesting ideas but I wouldn't start a thread about it until I could justify why it might be a good fit for what OFBiz needs (not criticizing anyone who does that, it's just seems to never come to anything).
>>
>> You're gonna love the set of threads I just started! ;) I've been thinking about doing these for a while now and decided to just go for it and see what happens...
>
> Since you are virtually without a doubt the person with the most experience using OFBiz, I'm actually more interested in how you would answer the questions you've posed rather than the opinions of the people who are most likely to comment.  But yes, I am certainly interested in what comes out of those threads and what you intend on doing with the responses you receive.

Well, now you've probably seen the Moqui write up that I sent out. That is a pretty good summary of ideas I've had floating around for a while. I was thinking of sending these out in these threads, but maybe that would just be redundant. If I have time in the next couple of days I'll pick out a few of the big ones (like the subscreens instead of decoration idea) and bring it up for discussion (that's something I think could be implemented in OFBiz without causing problems with existing stuff, but adopting it wholesale would require a lot of refactoring and rewriting I guess...).

In any case, my hope for these threads is to get feedback on OFBiz and hopefully get people (including myself) thinking more openly about what the framework is and how that is working for all of us, and how it could be better. Some ideas can probably be implemented to improve things without a lot of side-effects or non-backwards compatibility issues. Other ideas may involve such significant changes that it's not likely they will ever make it into project, even if they have a lot of merit. Not bad ideas, and maybe really great ideas, just tough to get going.

As far as future intentions go, I dunno... I hadn't thought past the discussion phase as I guess beyond that depends a lot on the results of the discussions. Maybe it's just that I've been brainstorming myself so much in recent months, and have enjoyed it so much, that I thought it might be valuable for others. It's interesting to look at how we do things and ask things like "if I could change anything, what would it be?" and "if I could do this development task any way I wanted how would I do it?" I've been doing a lot more custom work based on OFBiz recently as opposed to developing things to go in the project and I find myself asking myself these questions a lot (maybe out of boredom? ;) ).

-David