Re: Tasks for a release

Posted by David E Jones-2 on Jul 25, 2006; 8:47am
URL: http://ofbiz.116.s1.nabble.com/Re-Tasks-for-a-release-tp170046p170060.html


I guess I should have been more specific, I meant more along the lines of community driven business application projects and not the more general category of "enterprise level projects" as I wrote.

Postgres is an interesting example of a community driven project that is pretty independent. On the infrastructure level there are quite a few projects, like many under the Apache umbrella, that would be similar I guess.

The trick with business applications is that there is no industry standard to implement to, in other words there is no spec or standard from W3C, OMG, ANSI, Sun/JCP, etc that says "this is what constitutes an implementation of the GSBPBMS 1.0 (Global Standard Best Practices Business Management System) specification. It sure would be nice if such a thing existed....

Early on with OFBiz I researched a lot of standards from various groups like OMG, OAGIS, OASIS, and so on that would not define an entire system, but at least parts of a such a system. The UBL standard might be worth supporting, but there is the issue that not only might it be hard to find sponsors or volunteers for building it, but it might be hard to find users (beta or production) for it...

BTW, another interesting thing that Postgres and various ASF projects have is an origin as a product developed or owned by a company (either open source or commercial) that later became community-driven, or in other words a more publicity friendly alternative to abandonment of the software. ;) In a way it's unfortunate that OFBiz did not benefit from that sort of past as we might have been able to avoid some of the significant growing pains that were part of the more evolutionary process that brought the project (especially the framework, but very much also the applications) to where it is now.

-David


Si Chen wrote:

> Postgresql is a good example.
>
> On Jul 24, 2006, at 1:52 PM, David E Jones wrote:
>
>>
>> Chris,
>>
>> Exactly. If anyone knows of any I'd love to see how they're doing
>> things... it's not an easy course in general, and I'm not sure if
>> there are really many community driven enterprise level projects.
>>
>> -David
>>
>>
>> Chris Howe wrote:
>>> Are there any open source projects that are not driven
>>> by a single company that successfully implement
>>> feature freeze releases AND would have the complexity
>>> of feature advancements that OFBiz does (this would
>>> exclude most, if not all, Apache projects as most of
>>> them are one trick ponies, so to speak)?  If there
>>> are, maybe we should see how they best accopmlish
>>> this.
>>> --- Si Chen <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>>> David,
>>>>
>>>> Without coordinating a feature freeze between the
>>>> major contributors,  it would be very very difficult, especially for
>>>> less
>>>> experienced  "volunteers", to maintain the release branches and
>>>> fix the bugs.    From my personal experience trying to create the
>>>> opentaps releases,  a good release can only be created if the original
>>>> version is  reasonably stable and if the core developers
>>>> significantly support  the effort by helping to push the bug fixes from
>>>> trunk to the release  branch.
>>>>
>>>> On the issue of stability:
>>>>
>>>> 1.  I propose that we put this
>>>> http://jira.undersunconsulting.com/ browse/OFBIZ-500 back into the
>>>> main code base.  It
>>>> addressed a  typecast issue with field-to-field.
>>>>
>>>> 2.  I think we should take a vote: how many people
>>>> would like to keep  current code "as is", so the "OID" data type (used
>>>> for storing images  and content) works with Derby and not PostgreSQL,
>>>> versus making a  change which would make it work with PostgreSQL and
>>>> not Derby?
>>>>
>>>> 3.  I'll just keep my fingers crossed about the
>>>> Geronimo transactions  manager then.
>>>>
>>>> Si
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Jul 24, 2006, at 10:13 AM, David E Jones wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>