On Jan 12, 2006, at 1:25 PM, Yoav Shapira wrote:
There IS a conceptual and code-level separation between the OFBiz framework and components built on top of it, but I think it makes a nice cohesive project together. It's sort of like if Tomcat and Struts were under the same umbrella: not necessary, but not hurtful as long as people can independently download, use, develop, and contribute to either layer. My understanding is the OFBiz has always been like that, which is good.
Just a quick comment on this to save people reading in having to dig stuff up... We have been working more and more toward a separation of the framework and the applications. It has always been possible, though for some situations not real easy, to use specific tools in the framework and such, so the direction we are working toward is to have perhaps even separate releases for the framework and the applications. If you look in the OFBiz SVN repository the applications part is the "applications" directory and the framework is everything else. Oh, well, except the "specialized" directory which is sort of growing into a "commons" type of area for people working on specific open source extensions to OFBiz.
So, anyway, the framework release would include all of the tools, the example component (with entity defs, service defs and implementations, and UI level artifacts for an example UI following certain best practices patterns), and the only other webapp would be the webtools component which has a UI for various framework related or more technical tools that can be used while the server is running (like cache viewing/stats/maintenance, and UIs related to framework components like the Service Engine, Entity Engine, Workflow Engine, Data File Tool, etc).
In another email the applications were described as kind of the ultimate example of how to use the framework for real world business problems, and that is a good way of looking at it and one way of using these parts of OFBiz.
It may not happen right away as we work on getting OFBiz into Apache, but eventually these are some of various distinct sub-projects mentioned in the proposal that could go under a top level OFBiz project.
-David
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
