OFBiz Workshop Session at Apachecon EU 2015
Attendees:
Jacopo Capellato, Olivier Heintz, Hans Bakker, Pierre Smits, Nicolas Malin, Gil Portenseigne, Youssef Khaye, Nicolas Malin, Julien Nicolas, Nathan Boudou, Sharan Foga, Christian Geisert,
Location:
Corinthia Hotel, Budapest
Time: 10:30 - 13:00
Workshop Objectives
- Retrospective of last year's meeting
- Identification and disucussion of topics raised by attendees
Background
The meeting started with a round table brainstorming of topics to be discussed. The following topics were raised:
- Retrospecitve of the Apachecon workshop that had been held the year before and looking at what had and had not been achieved.
- OFBiz Release Strategy
- Minilang
- OFBiz Framewoerk
- Freemarker
- OFBiz UX
- OFBiz Business Demo
- Automated Testing
Discussion Topic: Retrospective
There was a general discussion about all the topics raised during the previous Apachecon workshop in Budapest; Fourteen proposals came from that meeting
Proposal | Status | Commentsase |
---|---|---|
1.Tidy up OFBiz Technical Framework or Kernel | In Progress | Sharan created diagrams based this proposal; The idea to start working has been raised several times on the mailing list but no work has yet been done of the proposal; Unsure of what is stopping progress on this |
2.Define and imple,ent a process to manage code that has been cleaned out | ||
3. Tidy or Clean Up OFBiz Business Framework | ||
4. Implement OFBiz Application Documentation | In Progress | Sharan has asked for technical reviews of the Webhelp addon to see how this can be integrated into the trunk Ron and Sharan are also currently doing a DITA proof of concept for some basic OFBiz application documentation to see how it could work; (if successful then proposals will be made to the community to look at introducing it) |
5. Externqal Dependencies Refactoring | ||
6. Build a Project Roadmap / High Level Plan | Sharan drafted some details LINK; | |
7. Ensure Business Success Stories are Documented | In Progress | Wiki and mailing lists are currently being used to capture details; The new OFBiz website will probably consolidate this information a bit more for display etc |
8. Marketing the OFBiz Demo to Business End Users | Not Started | There have been several discussions on the mailing lists about this but no actual progress has been made. Julien's presentation on UX Design has highlighted some of the problems with the current user interface |
9. Build a set of Common Core Marketing Material | In Progress | Progress on this has been slow but the French team have provided a template that could be used. |
10. Housekeeping qnd Ongoing Maintenance | In Progress | T |
11. Establish a group of mini subject matter experts covering business and technical | Not Started | |
12. Work on q Strategy to encourage more business users | In Progress | Website re-design and business based demo |
13. Look qt developing a full testing strategy | Not Started | |
14. Actively Manage OFBiz Branding and Trademarks | In Progress | Quite a bit of work has been done on this over the year. We have consolidated the OFBiz logo and removed 'the Open For Business Project' text. We are also in the process of registering Apache OFBiz and OFBiz as trademarks |
Although some progress has been made the general feeling was that things happen at a slower pace because of the commnunity interaction and discussion that needs to take place. Some people are used to things being done quickly and may find this frustrating so we need to recognise this so that people do not become discouraged by the time it takes for things to get moving.
Discussion Topic: Freemarker
Jacopo mentioned that Freemarker is now an incubating project at Apache. Their main committer is based in Budapest and he arranged to meet him informally. Jacopo mentioned that the Freemarker team are keen to build up a user community around their project and as OFBiz makes use of Freemarker, it ,might be interesting to subscribe to their mailing lists to understand what is happening. He also highlighted that the Freemarker team are very interested in getting feedback about their produt and are happy to get any suggestions for improvements or notifications of bugs that need to be fixed;
This could be a good opportunity to build closing links between our communities that be very beneficial to both.
Details of their mailing lists are as follow/
Developer list: dev@freemarker.incubator.apache.org. Subscribe, Unsubscribe (After clicking on these links, send the appearing empty mail as is.)
Commit and Jira notifications: notifications@freemarker.incubator.apache.org. Subscribe, Unsubscribe (After clicking on these links, send the appearing empty mail as is.)
Discussion Topic: Framework
Discussion Topic: Migrating Minilang to Groovy
Discussion Topic: User Experience / Business User Demo
Discussion Topic: Release Strategy
Pierre raised a topic regarding the release strategy and the visibility it would give to the community. Over the last few years since we changed the release naming we know that we will release one new branch per year (e.g 09.04, 10.04,11.04, etc) and also update releases for all our active branches. This means that we could plan our releases. We could put together a high level plan with an estimated month for each proposed release and then have the visibility about what could be included or not.
This could also help contributors and committers to provide patches etc for specific releases.
Jacopo mentioned that the project tends to have 3 active releases ongoing. The life of each releases is 3-4 years.The project doesnt have to create new branch releases yearly but the discussion highlighted that regular releases shows that the project and community is active. Also the ASF use project releases as a measure of the healthiness of projects.
We currently have a details about tentative releases that are published on the OFBiz download page https://ofbiz.apache.org/download.html but it isnt getting actively updated when a proposed release date has been missed;
Discussion Topic: Automated Tests