[Mifos-developer] Passivity for Mifos

[Soham Dhakal]

Hi All,

What are the rules around passivity for Mifos? Granted that we only have few (one?) live clients, and only one release version, this is manageable.

Lets say if i add a functionality that changes the current schema, (and for a live client to upgrade), should there be some scripts to manage/migrate existing data (from previous version of mifos).  Shouldn't this be part of the functionality?. is there some documentation around this?

 

 

Thanks

Soham

[Van Mittal-Henkle]

Hi Soham,

 

Mifos has a built in mechanism for managing changes related to schema evolution and migrating existing data.  This is documented on the following wiki:

 

http://mifos.org/developers/technical-orientation/mifos-database-development#how-to-properly-script

 

--Van

 

---

From: mifos-devel...@lists.sourceforge.net [mailto:mifos-devel...@lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of Soham Dhakal
Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2007 10:53 PM
To: 'Developer'
Subject: [Mifos-developer] Passivity for Mifos

[Soham Dhakal]

Hi all,

I was going to put off this discussion till after 1.1 but thought I would send it just so we have a discussion going.

 

As it stands in mifos, every funtionality that is developed is integrated (now this might be to make it easier for MFIs). But once a lot of custom requirements are added as mifos gains popularity, this could lead to features that MFIs do not need. And  the upgrade of functionality is very linear, meaning i have to upgrade in sequence regardless of the functionality I want.

 

Are there plans to make it more feature oriented?

 

For e.g. A feature is developed based on version 1.1 code. Now as a MFI I want to just add that feature without taking other features before that (granted rules around dependencies are followed etc)..

I  presume, as features are added, hardware requirements might change (disk space, RAM) so it would be nice if MFIs could pick and choose with feature they would like to have given the hardware costs. I mean currently there are settings which can "turn off/on" a feature, and perhaps this can address this concern. But i think if there was a modular (kinda like plugin) concept, MFIs could pick and choose features they want installed.

 

Also, i am thinking of the scenario where an MFI is having issues with particular functionality in their production env, and want to want to back it out, but not downgrade all the way down.

 

I do realize that this discussion might be a little early in the product lifecycle because most of the features built and being built are pretty generic. but we might want to think about how we are going to continue adding features to mifos.

 

Furthermore, (for developers) when we submit a patch and base it on a revision, by the time the patch is applied the database version and app version might have been different because of other patches in queue. Once we have more and more people participating this might get tedious. So if we based upgrades on feature set, and check conditions against that feature (for checking passivity, dependency) it might be easier.

 

Finally, this kind of discussion might have already taken place, and given the traget and use of mifos, the cost might outweigh the benefit. However I am just thinking out loud and wanted to see what others think.

 

Regards

Soham

[Van Mittal-Henkle]

Hi Soham,

 

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.

 

This is a topic that we have been thinking about and it will be one of the areas that we look at after the 1.1 release.

 

In general Mifos could be much more modular than it is now.  As you mention, you can imagine that Mifos could provide multiple modules that could each exist independent of one another.  When Mifos is configured, a given deployment could pick and choose what feature set they needed and Mifos could load only those modules (features) which were selected via configuration.

 

There are various ways that this basic idea could be realized and after our 1.1 relase I anticipate that there will be some good discussions on this topic.

 

Cheers,

--Van

---

From: mifos-devel...@lists.sourceforge.net [mailto:mifos-devel...@lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of Soham Dhakal

Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2008 9:31 PM
To: 'Mifos functional discussions'
Cc: 'Developer'
Subject: [Mifos-developer] Discussion around Functional Modules andUpgrading /downgrading

[Andres Pacheco]

Following that train of thought a bit further, has there been any discussion on offering Mifos under the SaaS (Software-as-aService) model, a hosted ASP/BSP (Application Service Provider/Business Service Provider) type solution? It seems to me that there would be tremendous value - lower costs, greater flexibility and faster implementations - for the MFIs of the world in this type of scenario.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft
Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008.
http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/