what if you could start over again?

[Sonny To-2]

Hi,
I'm evaluating an ecommerce solution for a client. I installed ofbiz
and the demo looks great. It has all the feature that my client needs.
 Then I asked myself what if I needed to customize and modify the
code... so I looked at the code.

I realize ofbiz was started a few years ago and developers had to
build a lot of infrastructure to do stuff like persistence...
something I take for granted today with hibernate. If you can start
over again, what would you change?

I would replace the whole entitymodel.xml stuff with a rich domain
model. I'm new to ofbiz so correct me if I'm wrong. It seems
entitymodel.xml is used to define domain objects. Why not define
domain objects in Java? Java is has a much richer type system than
xml. Furthermore entitymodel.xml  its redundant because u will need a
Java version of the entity defined in the xml anyway.

If I could do it over, I would remove the entitymodel.xml and the
org.ofbiz.entity.* packages and replace it with hibernate.

Browsing the code, I do not have a good sense of what the domain
objects are. The domain objects are one of the important pieces if not
the most important part of any system. Take a domain concept like
Product for example. I see there's a org.ofbiz.product.* packages but
no Product class! or is it hidden somewhere in an entitymodel.xml
file? ofbiz does not have a good domain model IMHO.  Because of this
adding new feature and maintenance would be costly IMHO.  I'm hesitant
to recommend to the client  because of the potential high maintenance
even though it has all the feature my client needs.

If I were to start over again, I would use Grails which is a
Groovy/Java framework using Spring, Hibernate, and SiteMesh. Grails
copies ideas from Ruby on Rails.
With Grails/Ralis, I can create a solution that meets the clients need
in a month or two.

So if you had to do it over again, how would u do it?

Happy Holidays!
Sonny

[Adrian Crum]

Sonny,

I think you need to take a little more time to look into OFBiz. Your comments and questions seem a
bit premature.

-Adrian

Sonny To wrote:

> Hi,
> I'm evaluating an ecommerce solution for a client. I installed ofbiz
> and the demo looks great. It has all the feature that my client needs.
>  Then I asked myself what if I needed to customize and modify the
> code... so I looked at the code.
>
> I realize ofbiz was started a few years ago and developers had to
> build a lot of infrastructure to do stuff like persistence...
> something I take for granted today with hibernate. If you can start
> over again, what would you change?
>
> I would replace the whole entitymodel.xml stuff with a rich domain
> model. I'm new to ofbiz so correct me if I'm wrong. It seems
> entitymodel.xml is used to define domain objects. Why not define
> domain objects in Java? Java is has a much richer type system than
> xml. Furthermore entitymodel.xml  its redundant because u will need a
> Java version of the entity defined in the xml anyway.
>
> If I could do it over, I would remove the entitymodel.xml and the
> org.ofbiz.entity.* packages and replace it with hibernate.
>
> Browsing the code, I do not have a good sense of what the domain
> objects are. The domain objects are one of the important pieces if not
> the most important part of any system. Take a domain concept like
> Product for example. I see there's a org.ofbiz.product.* packages but
> no Product class! or is it hidden somewhere in an entitymodel.xml
> file? ofbiz does not have a good domain model IMHO.  Because of this
> adding new feature and maintenance would be costly IMHO.  I'm hesitant
> to recommend to the client  because of the potential high maintenance
> even though it has all the feature my client needs.
>
> If I were to start over again, I would use Grails which is a
> Groovy/Java framework using Spring, Hibernate, and SiteMesh. Grails
> copies ideas from Ruby on Rails.
> With Grails/Ralis, I can create a solution that meets the clients need
> in a month or two.
>
> So if you had to do it over again, how would u do it?
>
> Happy Holidays!
> Sonny
>

[BJ Freeman]

Nope, I dumped hibernate for ofbiz
would not go back.

first you need to stop thinking in object logic
The you need to look at the multitude of UI that have been added besides
the widgets.

and yes you need to spend a lot of time getting to know ofbiz.
starting here
http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBADMIN/OFBiz+Documentation+Index


Sonny To sent the following on 12/19/2007 12:20 PM:

> Hi,
> I'm evaluating an ecommerce solution for a client. I installed ofbiz
> and the demo looks great. It has all the feature that my client needs.
>  Then I asked myself what if I needed to customize and modify the
> code... so I looked at the code.
>
> I realize ofbiz was started a few years ago and developers had to
> build a lot of infrastructure to do stuff like persistence...
> something I take for granted today with hibernate. If you can start
> over again, what would you change?
>
> I would replace the whole entitymodel.xml stuff with a rich domain
> model. I'm new to ofbiz so correct me if I'm wrong. It seems
> entitymodel.xml is used to define domain objects. Why not define
> domain objects in Java? Java is has a much richer type system than
> xml. Furthermore entitymodel.xml  its redundant because u will need a
> Java version of the entity defined in the xml anyway.
>
> If I could do it over, I would remove the entitymodel.xml and the
> org.ofbiz.entity.* packages and replace it with hibernate.
>
> Browsing the code, I do not have a good sense of what the domain
> objects are. The domain objects are one of the important pieces if not
> the most important part of any system. Take a domain concept like
> Product for example. I see there's a org.ofbiz.product.* packages but
> no Product class! or is it hidden somewhere in an entitymodel.xml
> file? ofbiz does not have a good domain model IMHO.  Because of this
> adding new feature and maintenance would be costly IMHO.  I'm hesitant
> to recommend to the client  because of the potential high maintenance
> even though it has all the feature my client needs.
>
> If I were to start over again, I would use Grails which is a
> Groovy/Java framework using Spring, Hibernate, and SiteMesh. Grails
> copies ideas from Ruby on Rails.
> With Grails/Ralis, I can create a solution that meets the clients need
> in a month or two.
>
> So if you had to do it over again, how would u do it?
>
> Happy Holidays!
> Sonny
>
>
>

[David E Jones]

I am a bit biased on this being the original architect of the OFBiz  
framework, and having done quite a bit of the implementation as well.

That said...

On Dec 19, 2007, at 12:20 PM, Sonny To wrote:

> Hi,
> I'm evaluating an ecommerce solution for a client. I installed ofbiz
> and the demo looks great. It has all the feature that my client needs.
> Then I asked myself what if I needed to customize and modify the
> code... so I looked at the code.
>
> I realize ofbiz was started a few years ago and developers had to
> build a lot of infrastructure to do stuff like persistence...
> something I take for granted today with hibernate. If you can start
> over again, what would you change?
>
> I would replace the whole entitymodel.xml stuff with a rich domain
> model. I'm new to ofbiz so correct me if I'm wrong. It seems
> entitymodel.xml is used to define domain objects. Why not define
> domain objects in Java?

The main reason not to is that a Java object model is object oriented,  
not relational like the relational (SQL) databases that OFBiz uses for  
persistence. Because these are very different things a great deal of  
mapping is needed to translate from a relational model to an object  
model, hence the term object-relational mapping.

The OFBiz framework avoids this by using a relational data model top  
to bottom.

> Java is has a much richer type system than
> xml. Furthermore entitymodel.xml  its redundant because u will need a
> Java version of the entity defined in the xml anyway.

You're right, if you want an object model you have to do mapping code  
between the object model and the relational model. That's why we don't  
do it (we don't want the overhead!).

> If I could do it over, I would remove the entitymodel.xml and the
> org.ofbiz.entity.* packages and replace it with hibernate.

I wouldn't... Hibernate IS an object-relational mapping tool. It's a  
great one, but the redundancy is still there. That would add tens of  
thousands of lines of Java code to OFBiz, and at the end of the day it  
probably wouldn't reduce more than a line here and there of the  
existing code base... but there's more, so much more!

If we used an object model on the data tier we would have to do object-
service mapping, object-form mapping, object-etc mapping... and that  
would introduce so much redundancy that trying to build an ERP system  
based on it might kill our poor little community! (well, it's fairly  
big, but still tiny compared to the typical ERP implementation teams  
plus large scale ecommerce teams, etc, etc that involved many  
hundreds, or many thousands even, of full-time people).

> Browsing the code, I do not have a good sense of what the domain
> objects are. The domain objects are one of the important pieces if not
> the most important part of any system. Take a domain concept like
> Product for example. I see there's a org.ofbiz.product.* packages but
> no Product class! or is it hidden somewhere in an entitymodel.xml
> file? ofbiz does not have a good domain model IMHO.  Because of this
> adding new feature and maintenance would be costly IMHO.  I'm hesitant
> to recommend to the client  because of the potential high maintenance
> even though it has all the feature my client needs.

By "domain model" do you mean object model? OFBiz has two main models  
actually: a data (entity) model, and a service (login) model. This is  
more real-world friendly than an artificial "domain model".

> If I were to start over again, I would use Grails which is a
> Groovy/Java framework using Spring, Hibernate, and SiteMesh. Grails
> copies ideas from Ruby on Rails.
> With Grails/Ralis, I can create a solution that meets the clients need
> in a month or two.

Have you compared the efficiency of such an architecture with the  
efficiency of the OFBiz framework?

Like I said above, it would overwhelm the community for both the  
creation and maintenance using that approach. Why do you think such a  
project doesn't already exist?

> So if you had to do it over again, how would u do it?

There are a lot of things I'd to clean up in the framework, lots of  
things that we've learned over the years and we've added better ways  
to do things and then had to deprecate old things and such. From a  
high level perspective, like a general pattern and architecture  
approach? Nope, I wouldn't change a thing.

But, then again, I am biased... I've heard the same sentiments from a  
lot of OFBiz users, but we don't have the marketing budget or big  
corporate affiliations to convince the world en-masse... it's just  
happening one developer at a time.

-David