Yes, that is definitely a good idea. Is it related to this right? http://www.opentaps.org/docs/index.php/ERP_Modules_with_GWT_and_Domain_Driven_Architecture

GWT can give us a lot of flexibility in this area, and yes we must leverage on it 🙂

Michele,

What do you think, instead of doing all this integration, if we were to use GWT to create the checkout and customer service pages, which can be loaded by any shopping cart? The shopping cart could just put the contents of the cart in XML on an HTML page and then use a tag to reference our checkout pages. We would then display the standard stuff and then create an order directly in opentaps. We can also serve up all the my account/address/email/orders stuff using GWT.

That way, you can use whatever front end system you want and hook up opentaps without any integration 🙂

More than that, using getter/setter methods when you write your services speed up the development at least two times.

@Si
Yes Spree look very promising, but his UI is still too poor to be compared with Magento\’s one. I think the next integrations should cover Zencart and OScommerce, that by the way were the most used e-commerce products out there (before Magento). Also integration with http://www.konakart.com should be considered (even if as far as i remember, the core is not open source).

What I am not so convinced about Ofbiz is your last comment about customization. From my point of view, easy customization is one of the basic requirements when choosing an e-commerce platform.

Thanks again for your clarifications and I will look at the XMLs and how to customize Ofbiz!

Thanks for letting us know. Please go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/opentaps/ and we’ll try to post more information about the integration there.

I am very happy to hear about your interest in integrating Magento with Opentaps. I just found Opentaps today and was very impressed with the breadth of features. I’m not too comfortable with Java, so for me this is the only sticking point. I’m not sure of the resources I will need to run this for my small business.

I look forward to hearing more about this integration effort.

Regards,

rdv

FYI you might not consider us an unbiased observer on this one, because even though at opentaps we offer ofbiz out-of-the-box and integration with Magento (and maybe Spree later), we are in fact significant users and beneficiaries of the ofbiz framework, I don’t consider myself an unbiased observer here either, so please take it all with a grain of salt.

I certainly don’t want to discourage you from using ofbiz. What I would recommend that you do is take a look at the technical framework of ofbiz, then ask yourself if you like working with the XML-based technologies such as minilang, screen widget, form widget, entity engine and service engine. How does the out-of-the-box e-commerce store look versus your ultimate goal, and how much customizations would you need to do?

Drew,

Thanks for posting your comments. You’ve actually brought up a lot of good points, and I’m glad they’re here for everybody to see.

First of all, I think spree is extremely impressive given how young of a project is, and if it continues at this pace, its future is certainly very promising.

As for Magento’s commercial leanings, I noticed it as well, and it seems to be part of a general trend in the “commercial open source” space. Here, though, the amount of community open source development around the Magento platform is very encouraging and may help offset that. For example, I was surprised by the third-party books that were available on Amazon, the number of add-on modules, and the size of the wiki, even if it’s not all well organized.

And yes, that is absolutely what we hope opentaps could become — the core engine of an enterprise, around which projects like Magento and Spree could be integrated.

This is why I don’t understand why you say it’s not so suitable for B2C stores. Is it due to the development complexity? or missing B2C features? and in the latter case which ones?

thanks in advance.

I think you made a very good point about the two major issues in looking at integration and using the ecommerce software for projects comes down to the familiarity and ability to use and program in the two languages and frameworks. From a developer’s point of view that is a pretty important issue. Spree just barely hit it’s 1.0 status and is extremely young.

One thing though that worries me about magento is its slow drift from what I see away from open source and more into a commercial project. Including features slowly being added to the commercial version that are not present in the open source version. I see this drift increasing as time goes on as they try and make sure they make a very large return either by selling the company or adding more investment over time to get that expected high rate of return on that initial vc investment.

Either way, I think opentaps looks to be the foundation and infrastructure at the core of a lot of businesses with integration points into whatever ecommerce solution that a company decides to go with.