I'm quite disillusioned by the ofBiz community, here's why:

1. Low emphasis on documentation. Or should I say, freely available documentation. The code is poorly documented, tutorials and Javadocs hardly exist, and when newbie questions are asked, the most frequently heard answers on the mailing list are: purchase the training videos, and purchase a subscription to the upcoming documentation site.

2. Little emphasis on coherent releases, no clear roadmap.

3. There is abit of an elitist attitude in the community, that goes along the lines of: ofBiz will make your life x times easier, and its incredibly powerful, and because its way of doing things is so different, it'll take you about 6 months to get productive in it. Excuse me, 6 months?

Having said that, however, I'm very impressed with the flexibility of the data model, and there are some very good ideas to be found in it. So, I had the idea of doing something like an ofBiz-for-sane-people project. 🙂 No, I'm just kidding.

What I'll probably do is revert to my old plan of building a Hibernate/Spring/Webwork2/Freemarker framework for developing web apps. Yes, you heard me right, Freemarker, not Velocity. I'm a recent convert to the power of taglibs, and would be pretty sweet to have access to them from the template. I will also use a portal framework for handling the integration between different web apps.

The to-do list, in chronological order:
1. Party manager, as per ofBiz
2. Classification manager, for managing topic maps
3. Document manager, the doc management system

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