I've chosen this solution after I've analyzed a large number of frameworks (open source and proprietary) - ERPs, CRMs and billing systems.
This framework was the most attractive to me as it had most of the functionality that we needed and the internal architecture was pretty nice and modern. It was easy to install the demo and play with it.
It provides support for typical three tier architecture applications: presentation (MVC), business logic and persistence. The design is very modular with components and applications. It is very easy to override, extend or even rewrite parts of the framework. It is very easy to plug-in other engines like; templating engine or workflow engine if desired.
I knew before I've started that this framework is huge (its data spans over 850 tables) and it will require a steep learning curve on my side. This framework was developed over 10 years and it is very complex. It had various redesigns at various stages.
I've started by trying to change the eCommerce application that comes with the framework as I hoped I can get some fast results (sort of hacking approach to show a quick prototype). This was such a bad idea; this application is so complex that unless you are familiar with this framework you will get lost. By just looking at the code and searching documentation I could not understand properly the entire mechanism. Besides, the default UI design and styles are so ugly, outdated and poorly implemented that it made me reconsider my approach.
My next approach was to read as much documentation as possible (of course I didn't have time to read all the existing documentation) and try to develop a very simple application by looking into the provided examples (cover implementation at all layers and try the engines provided with the framework). In the mean time I had prepared the requirements document, high level design, UI design together with my team mates.
This was a constant struggle as the documentation is not up to date, cannot be found in one place and some parts are older or newer than others.
I've found these tutorials which contain three hello world applications; none of them worked for me without struggle. The tutorials are otherwise good but one cannot download the code so it is easy to mistype some code and have many errors and exceptions (I've found this stupid). I could not even find blogs or comments on why various parts did not work, I was left on my own devices... After some days of struggle (almost 1 week) I was able to show to my team a simple application, far from being a perfect example of how we should implement in practice and less than I wanted to show them.
I've tried to implement services using OfBiz minilang. Although it is very simple to create a service if something goes wrong the errors are so cryptic that it is impossible to tell what the problem is. I also could not find much documentation so far. The service implemented in Java although are very verbose it is so simple to handle errors and to trace specific actions.
The entity engine is very nice, as it removes the need to work directly into the database. Any change to the database is done through a configuration file and a restart of the application. It sounds easy but now, instead of SQL language one has to deal with the specifics of the entity engine and is quite a steep learning curve.
I discovered some good documentation in regard to the framework architecture hidden into the actual code (that I recommend):
To be continued...
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