I have been browsing through Apache OfBiz documentation these days. It is a power packed offering combining the niceties of a weba based framework, to a strong set of existing abstractions to augment you website. Primarily, it is meant for building e-commerce stores. The architecture allows you to build plugins encapsulating the business use cases, and at the same time, extending any available functionality is also pretty easy.

This is a great offering for all the mom and pop stores, which have limited catalog strength and still are in phase of scaling up their businesses. Being open source provides a healthy and proven set components being used at various portals.

The recipe has Java as the core framework, java derivatives like Beanshell and Jython as the scripting tools, and Freemarker as the templating engine. One might argue that instead of a framework, it is a glue that hold various things close, but the real power is the existing library of components/abstractions shipped along with it.

As far as extensions are concerned, it can be compared to mozilla style development.

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I am reading “Fortune at the Bottom of Pyramid” by C K Prahalad. incidently, he founded a company named praja inc., based on principles of this book, which was later sold to TIBCO after 1/3rd of the staff was laid off

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