Some significant changes for opentaps in the near future

Hi everybody,

I just wanted to let you know about some significant changes we are planning for the near future.

Basically, we're hoping to make opentaps more modular, so you can develop your own customizations or add-on modules and port them across different versions of opentaps more easily.  In particular, the changes we have in mind are:

1. Move the opentaps applications from hot deploy to a new opentaps/ subdirectory which is parallel with framework, applications, specialpurpose, and hot deploy. This will make hot deploy a true "hot deploy" again.
2. Make the domain directory component specific. The one in opentaps common will be the default domain directory, but you can override it by having a module specific domain directory.
3. Implement the portal concept from http://www.opentaps.org/docs/index.php/Opentaps_2.0_Planning, but within the context of the existing framework. This will allow you to load new screens and tabs into existing applications from another module. For example, you will be able to add a tab "Payroll" with screens into opentaps Financials without modifying financials.
4. Allow the loading of GWT UI labels from the components, instead of all from opentaps common.
5. Enhancing data import to allow products, inventory, customers, suppliers, and GL accounts to be imported from an Excel spreadsheet into the DataImport* entities
6. Cleaning up the mycompany/ directory and setting up a template company there that can be loaded as extseed,  so after an install with extseed, you can just go into the various user interfaces, modify the default values, and have your company set up.

These changes are all planned to take place soon, starting next week for the easier ones and probably in the next couple of months or so for the ones which require some development.

Related to this, we will also be moving our source code repository from subversion to git. I will post separately about that.