First LAJUG night with Si Chen

Went to my first LAJUG meeting tonight. Si Chen @ Open Source Strategies, Inc presented Open For Business In A Nutshell. I have to confess that I almost passed the meeting for mistaken it as some talk on open source business model. Turns out it is about ofbiz open source project and I am glad that I didn't miss the presentation.

Si is not only a commiter on the ofbiz project but also build his own online shopping site using ofbiz. The fact that he eats his own dog food makes him much creditable to me.

I briefly checked out ofbiz workflow about two years ago. My major reservation at the time was its map based API. I was worried about the loss of compile time check, refactoring support in IDE etc. When I raised the question tonight at the meeting, Si responded that he does not find this to be a problem in his experience. In fact he actually finds the map based API is easy to work with than traditional type based API. I didn't get a chance to ask him what kind of team he had to work with. My current take on the issue is that such a approach may be more suitable for a small and competent team, but probably not in a large team consists of programmers with various experience level.

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