[OFBiz] Users - Hello, world

[davidnwelton]

Hello,

I have inherited an e-commerce site + stocking system + other bits and
pieces written on PHP and Python on top of Mysql.  I'm investigating
other approaches, although since the current system does work, we may
only end up using ideas from what I find out there.  OFBiz is one of
the first things I found, and it looks interesting.  I'm trying to get
a handle on it, but it's pretty big, so while I've tried to read up
first, forgive me if any of my questions end up being the moral
equivalent of asking whether a mountain bike takes leaded or unleaded
fuel...  Unfortunately I do not yet have a free machine where I can
set this system up and run it to test it out.

1) First up, some of the 'scripts' seem kind of intimidating.  What's
the background for the XML stuff like:

            <if-compare-field field-name="availableToPromiseTotal"
to-field-name="productFacility.minimumStock" operator="less"
type="Double">

it looks like it's extremely painful if you have to write that kind of
code by hand.  Is their creation somehow automated either with a GUI
or from some other source code format?

2) I'm curious how ofbiz would stack up against some issues that our
current system seems to have.  For example:

An order goes out to a client, who then sends back one of the items
from the order.  My research indicates that so far, ofbiz is still
with me.  Then, an operator here mistakenly enters the returned item
as a returned order, rather than just a returned item.  Currently the
answer is "go fiddle with the database to roll it back".  Yuck.

We get orders in from suppliers, then need to store the products until
all the items to send out to a particular client are ready.  We use an
in-house bar code system for this.  How hard is something like that to
integrate into ofbiz?  How about when a client's order is ready,
printout out a list of things to send? (This is pick/pack, right?)

Continuing with this one... a lot of our orders are for single items,
so instead of stocking all the items that arrive from the supplier and
then pulling them back out again, a better algorithm would be to short
circuit this and put all the single-items aside for immediate
shipping.

There are other things like this, but this ought to give me an idea of
how things might work...

Thankyou for your time,
--
David N. Welton
 - http://www.dedasys.com/davidw/

Apache, Linux, Tcl Consulting
 - http://www.dedasys.com/
 
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[Charles Johnson-2]

David,

I'm a newbie myself, so consider my comments merely preliminary to those
of others with more expertise:

1. Check out
http://www.ofbiz.org/docs/minilang.html

The idea of the MiniLang is to *save* labour time, although i think
setting up your favourite editor to produce these xml elements would
probably be a good thing. e.g. a TextPad 'clip library' would be useful.

2. Check out the POS application

CJ

David Welton wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I have inherited an e-commerce site + stocking system + other bits and
>pieces written on PHP and Python on top of Mysql.  I'm investigating
>other approaches, although since the current system does work, we may
>only end up using ideas from what I find out there.  OFBiz is one of
>the first things I found, and it looks interesting.  I'm trying to get
>a handle on it, but it's pretty big, so while I've tried to read up
>first, forgive me if any of my questions end up being the moral
>equivalent of asking whether a mountain bike takes leaded or unleaded
>fuel...  Unfortunately I do not yet have a free machine where I can
>set this system up and run it to test it out.
>
>1) First up, some of the 'scripts' seem kind of intimidating.  What's
>the background for the XML stuff like:
>
>            <if-compare-field field-name="availableToPromiseTotal"
>to-field-name="productFacility.minimumStock" operator="less"
>type="Double">
>
>it looks like it's extremely painful if you have to write that kind of
>code by hand.  Is their creation somehow automated either with a GUI
>or from some other source code format?
>
>2) I'm curious how ofbiz would stack up against some issues that our
>current system seems to have.  For example:
>
>An order goes out to a client, who then sends back one of the items
>from the order.  My research indicates that so far, ofbiz is still
>with me.  Then, an operator here mistakenly enters the returned item
>as a returned order, rather than just a returned item.  Currently the
>answer is "go fiddle with the database to roll it back".  Yuck.
>
>We get orders in from suppliers, then need to store the products until
>all the items to send out to a particular client are ready.  We use an
>in-house bar code system for this.  How hard is something like that to
>integrate into ofbiz?  How about when a client's order is ready,
>printout out a list of things to send? (This is pick/pack, right?)
>
>Continuing with this one... a lot of our orders are for single items,
>so instead of stocking all the items that arrive from the supplier and
>then pulling them back out again, a better algorithm would be to short
>circuit this and put all the single-items aside for immediate
>shipping.
>
>There are other things like this, but this ought to give me an idea of
>how things might work...
>
>Thankyou for your time,
>--
>David N. Welton
> - http://www.dedasys.com/davidw/
>
>Apache, Linux, Tcl Consulting
> - http://www.dedasys.com/
>
>_______________________________________________
>Users mailing list
>[hidden email]
>http://lists.ofbiz.org/mailman/listinfo/users
>
>
>  
>

 
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[David E. Jones]

I wouldn't use some general text editor for this... it would not only  
be a pain to type in all of the elements, attributes, and enumerated  
attribute options, but it would also be a pain to remember all of the  
elements and attributes and legal attribute values for enumerated  
ones, and to validate the files you create.

There are over a dozen different XML files in OFBiz, and half a dozen  
that you'll use all the time. I highly recommend getting a good XML  
editor that can do completion (including documentation annotation  
popups), validation, and so on based on XSD files which is what OFBiz  
uses. I personally use one called Oxygen and I generally use it as an  
Eclipse plugin. There are lots of other options of course...

-David


On Nov 17, 2005, at 5:28 AM, Charles Johnson wrote:

> David,
>
> I'm a newbie myself, so consider my comments merely preliminary to  
> those
> of others with more expertise:
>
> 1. Check out
> http://www.ofbiz.org/docs/minilang.html
>
> The idea of the MiniLang is to *save* labour time, although i think
> setting up your favourite editor to produce these xml elements would
> probably be a good thing. e.g. a TextPad 'clip library' would be  
> useful.
>
> 2. Check out the POS application
>
> CJ
>
> David Welton wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I have inherited an e-commerce site + stocking system + other bits  
>> and
>> pieces written on PHP and Python on top of Mysql.  I'm investigating
>> other approaches, although since the current system does work, we may
>> only end up using ideas from what I find out there.  OFBiz is one of
>> the first things I found, and it looks interesting.  I'm trying to  
>> get
>> a handle on it, but it's pretty big, so while I've tried to read up
>> first, forgive me if any of my questions end up being the moral
>> equivalent of asking whether a mountain bike takes leaded or unleaded
>> fuel...  Unfortunately I do not yet have a free machine where I can
>> set this system up and run it to test it out.
>>
>> 1) First up, some of the 'scripts' seem kind of intimidating.  What's
>> the background for the XML stuff like:
>>
>>            <if-compare-field field-name="availableToPromiseTotal"
>> to-field-name="productFacility.minimumStock" operator="less"
>> type="Double">
>>
>> it looks like it's extremely painful if you have to write that  
>> kind of
>> code by hand.  Is their creation somehow automated either with a GUI
>> or from some other source code format?
>>
>> 2) I'm curious how ofbiz would stack up against some issues that our
>> current system seems to have.  For example:
>>
>> An order goes out to a client, who then sends back one of the items
>> from the order.  My research indicates that so far, ofbiz is still
>> with me.  Then, an operator here mistakenly enters the returned item
>> as a returned order, rather than just a returned item.  Currently the
>> answer is "go fiddle with the database to roll it back".  Yuck.
>>
>> We get orders in from suppliers, then need to store the products  
>> until
>> all the items to send out to a particular client are ready.  We  
>> use an
>> in-house bar code system for this.  How hard is something like  
>> that to
>> integrate into ofbiz?  How about when a client's order is ready,
>> printout out a list of things to send? (This is pick/pack, right?)
>>
>> Continuing with this one... a lot of our orders are for single items,
>> so instead of stocking all the items that arrive from the supplier  
>> and
>> then pulling them back out again, a better algorithm would be to  
>> short
>> circuit this and put all the single-items aside for immediate
>> shipping.
>>
>> There are other things like this, but this ought to give me an  
>> idea of
>> how things might work...
>>
>> Thankyou for your time,
>> --
>> David N. Welton
>> - http://www.dedasys.com/davidw/
>>
>> Apache, Linux, Tcl Consulting
>> - http://www.dedasys.com/
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Users mailing list
>> [hidden email]
>> http://lists.ofbiz.org/mailman/listinfo/users
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Users mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.ofbiz.org/mailman/listinfo/users

 
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[davidnwelton]

On 11/17/05, David E. Jones <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> I wouldn't use some general text editor for this... it would not only
> be a pain to type in all of the elements, attributes, and enumerated
> attribute options, but it would also be a pain to remember all of the
> elements and attributes and legal attribute values for enumerated
> ones, and to validate the files you create.

> There are over a dozen different XML files in OFBiz, and half a dozen
> that you'll use all the time. I highly recommend getting a good XML
> editor that can do completion (including documentation annotation
> popups), validation, and so on based on XSD files which is what OFBiz
> uses. I personally use one called Oxygen and I generally use it as an
> Eclipse plugin. There are lots of other options of course...

Over a dozen... in the svn checkout I have, there are a total of 1012!
 Of course they're certainly not all mini-lang files.

I was just curious why something like beanshell wasn't used, figuring
that there must be some good reasons that I wasn't aware of due to my
inexperience with this codebase and the problem domain.  (I might have
used something like Hecl [because I wrote it] or Jacl [because I like
Tcl], or some brand of Scheme but that's just me and I dont want to
get sidetracked on scripting language preferences:-)

In any case, I guess that's of secondary importance compared to my
second question and some of the example scenarios.  Another one that's
been brought to my attention: we get a bunch of different product
catalogs from suppliers electronically in all kinds of disparate
formats.  The other guys have said that it's not really possible or
reasonable to coerce those into some kind of standard format, so they
keep them as-is in DB tables and fish things out of those as needs
be...  Doable?

I guess I'll be able to get rid of some doubts when these guys come up
with a machine of my own to run stuff on and I can play with OFBiz
'live'.

Thankyou,
--
David N. Welton
 - http://www.dedasys.com/davidw/

Apache, Linux, Tcl Consulting
 - http://www.dedasys.com/
 
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[Andrew Sykes]

David,

The minilang thing might seem a little daunting, but as you become more
familiar with the general workings and terminology of OFBiz it becomes
rather nice to have something that expresses data manipulation in such a
succinct and OFBiz centric manner.

It's also very easy to learn, give yourself about a day ;-)

Kind Regards
--
Andrew Sykes <[hidden email]>
Sykes Development Ltd

 
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[Leon Torres-2]

David Welton wrote:

>
> An order goes out to a client, who then sends back one of the items
> from the order.  My research indicates that so far, ofbiz is still
> with me.  Then, an operator here mistakenly enters the returned item
> as a returned order, rather than just a returned item.  Currently the
> answer is "go fiddle with the database to roll it back".  Yuck.
>
> We get orders in from suppliers, then need to store the products until
> all the items to send out to a particular client are ready.  We use an
> in-house bar code system for this.  How hard is something like that to
> integrate into ofbiz?  How about when a client's order is ready,
> printout out a list of things to send? (This is pick/pack, right?)
>
> Continuing with this one... a lot of our orders are for single items,
> so instead of stocking all the items that arrive from the supplier and
> then pulling them back out again, a better algorithm would be to short
> circuit this and put all the single-items aside for immediate
> shipping.
>
> There are other things like this, but this ought to give me an idea of
> how things might work...

Briefly, OFBiz uses a Service Oriented Architecture. It makes  the business
logic pluggable, so you can easily rip out the parts that don't meet your
requirements and plug in a service that does what you need. As long as you stick
to the design principles, it is very easy to modify and maintain a customized
solution.

Also, the database schema is highly normalized, you can do pretty much anything
you want with it. For instance, it allows for multiple returns per order, so you
won't encounter the issue where a return is marked for the whole order. You
could probably add a field for bar codes to one of the entities, something which
is very easy to implement and maintain with the sophisticated entityengine. As
you customize ofbiz for your needs, you'll find yourself doing simplifications
more than feature additions and collaborating with others on new features.

And of course, the source code is there for you to play with and modify. :-)

- Leon

 
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