RE: Ofbiz and Ruby on Rails

Posted by Ryan Warnick on Aug 05, 2006; 5:45am
URL: http://ofbiz.116.s1.nabble.com/Ofbiz-and-Ruby-on-Rails-tp170367p170384.html

I've spent some time playing with RoR and it seems like the real value of
RoR is its ability to consume an "entity" definition and some UI artifacts
and then generate database tables, CRUD methods, and a web-based UI.  So,
based on my experience, I would tend to agree that there is a lot of overlap
with ofbiz functionality (entity engine, widgets, etc.).  On the other hand,
if the desire is to make Ruby (not RoR) available in ofbiz for implementing
services, etc., then that is a different story.

We have implemented several desktop-like applications by exposing ofbiz
services over JSON so that they can be consumed by an AJAX UI framework like
Dojo, GWT, Bindows, etc.  The real benefit here is being able to take entity
engine data structures maps and lists of maps and directly consume them on
the client side with very little glue code.  We also get the same benefit
going the other way (calling services).

Ryan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Howe [mailto:[hidden email]]
> Sent: Friday, August 04, 2006 9:31 PM
> To: [hidden email]
> Subject: Re: Ofbiz and Ruby on Rails
>
> Judging by the responses I think I misunderstand RoR.
> In my newly introduced mind I see RoR being of the same kind
> of animal as the OFBiz framework.  In that mindset it would
> be a replacement of sorts.
>
> I was trying to weigh whether it would be easier to expand
> OFBiz's UI capabilities with AJAX and getting a consensus on
> what an OFBiz template should and should not include (ie
> OFBiz standards) for modularity sake and what not or to
> rewrite OFBiz's busines logic in RoR.  
>
> The majority of the actual usefulness that I saw with RoR was
> the way it "consumes" data be it from a local database or a
> webservice.
>
> So, my question was more towards what is the ofbiz framework
> giving us that Ror can't or doesn't easily.
>
> And what benefits does RoR offer that can/can't be replicated
> in OFBiz?
>
> --- David E Jones <[hidden email]>
> wrote:
>
> >
> > This is an interesting topic from an infrastructure perspective. It
> > sounds like there is some suggestion of incorporating it into the
> > framework and moving to it as the standard UI layer tool set...
> >
> > Has anyone done any conversions of existing OFBiz artifacts
> to compare
> > size and complexity and establish some prospective tools or
> patterns
> > for integration with other pieces and such?
> > Actually, from a
> > PoC perspective once could do the same things we did early on with
> > OFBiz: define the artifacts and make sure we can define
> everything we
> > want, and then build the engine behind them. In other words
> we defined
> > XSD (or DTD in the early days) files, and some text XML
> files based on
> > them to develop towards and support. These were written to replace
> > specific pages, usually picking a more complicated one. For
> example,
> > the first form widget form in OFBiz was the EditProduct
> form with the
> > two columns and such, and that form definition existed even
> before the
> > form widget engine.
> >
> > This sort of PoC effort would be the first step for anything like
> > this.
> >
> > -David
> >
> >
> > On Aug 4, 2006, at 6:45 PM, Leon Torres wrote:
> >
> > > Yeah we've been looking into this kind of thing
> > and talking to some
> > > people about Rails and OFBiz.  This is actually a
> > huge topic which
> > > might be better discussed at a conference or
> > something.
> > >
> > > - Leon
> > >
> > >
> > > Chris Howe wrote:
> > >> Si and Leon and others,
> > >> I just started to look at some Ruby on Rails
> > stuff and
> > >> was curious as to your impressions of what
> > aspects of
> > >> OFBiz could not be replicated in RoR.  Or is it possible
> to get off
> > >> Java entirely?  How much of
> > OFBiz
> > >> could be entirely reused vs. how much would just
> > be
> > >> translating templates, etc?
> >
> >
>
>