Februari 13, 2012

Apache OFBiz - ASF Solution for Enterprise Automation

As my daily jobs require me to pay attention only to the development tools, I don't pay attention to this software in the first place. What I mean by this is, I realized that there is an ERP solution from Apache Software Foundation before but after I promise my students to give them a free and open source software in my "Business Information Systems" class, then I started to look for free and open source ERP package. Then I remember about Apache OFBiz Project which provide with a complete ERP package for free (in the sense of free beer and free speech). In the list below, you may have these functionalities inside (taken from the website):
  1. Advanced e-commerce 
  2. Catalog management 
  3. Promotion and pricing management 
  4. Order management (sales and purchase) 
  5. Customer management (part of general party management) 
  6. Warehouse management 
  7. Fulfillment (auto stock moves, batched pick, pack and ship) 
  8. Accounting (invoice, payment and billing accounts, fixed assets)
  9. Manufacturing management 
  10. General work effort management (events, tasks, projects, requests, etc)
  11. Content management (for product content, web sites, general content, blogging, forums, etc) 
  12. A maturing Point Of Sales (POS) module using a rich client interface 
  13. /etc
The installation is pretty straightforward as it was written in README files that goes inside the tarball (or actually the zipped file) that you can download. Unfortunately, you have to build and populate the database first (at first, it uses only JavaDB, but you may change it to another DBMS software.

To install the software, just unpack and then build and populate database by using Apache Ant which is already included in the distribution, and you are good to go:


$ unzip apache-ofbiz-10.04.zip
$ cd apache-ofbiz-10.04
$ ./ant run-install

Notes
 You can not use JDK7 with Apache OFBiz, instead use JDK6 (latest version is 1.6.0_29). I use 1.6.0_27 and it still works correctly. If you use Windows, read the README file. If you are too lazy, wipe away your Windows OS, install Linux, follow the instruction in this blog and you are all set. :p

After finish with "BUILD SUCCESS" notification, run Apache OFBiz using the shell script (startofbiz.sh) or batch file (startofbiz.bat) if you use Windows. At first you will be overwhelmed by too many messages in console:

$ ./startofbiz.sh 
Set OFBIZ_HOME to - /home/bpdp/master/apache-ofbiz/apache-ofbiz-10.04
Admin socket configured on - /127.0.0.1:10523
2012-02-14 01:34:02,569 (main) [    ContainerLoader.java:50 :INFO ] [Startup] Loading containers...
2012-02-14 01:34:02,966 (main) [ ComponentContainer.java:177:INFO ] Auto-Loading component directory : [/home/bpdp/master/apache-ofbiz/apache-ofbiz-10.04/framework]
2012-02-14 01:34:03,007 (main) [ ComponentContainer.java:238:INFO ] Loading component : [geronimo]
2012-02-14 01:34:03,062 (main) [ ComponentContainer.java:238:INFO ] Loading component : [sql]
..........
..........
..........
..........
..........
2012-02-14 01:35:00,935 (default-invoker-Thread-11) [                Log.java:111:INFO ] [CommonPermissionServices.xml#genericBasePermissionCheck] Checking for primary permission ACCOUNTING_CREATE
2012-02-14 01:35:00,961 (default-invoker-Thread-11) [     ServiceEcaRule.java:134:INFO ] For Service ECA [fixedAssetPermissionCheck] on [return] got false for condition: [hasPermission][equals][false][true][Boolean]
2012-02-14 01:35:00,972 (default-invoker-Thread-11) [  ServiceDispatcher.java:599:INFO ] Sync service [JobDispatcher/fixedAssetPermissionCheck] finished in [3751] milliseconds
2012-02-14 01:35:01,000 (default-invoker-Thread-8) [  ServiceDispatcher.java:599:INFO ] Sync service [JobDispatcher/sendEmailDated] finished in [4124] milliseconds
2012-02-14 01:35:01,105 (default-invoker-Thread-11) [  ServiceDispatcher.java:599:INFO ] Sync service [JobDispatcher/createMaintsFromTimeInterval] finished in [3898] milliseconds

To see your e-Commerce site (the front page of your Apache OFBiz application), go to http://server:8080/ecommerce.




The backend can be accessed by using http://server:8443/webtools.





For the first time, you may login using "admin" as username and "ofbiz" as password.




Here is the result of backend login:





You may see that this kind of software can be a good example of free and open source software for your business need. If you are a technopreneur, why don't you get involved in the project and sell the service to customers? It's up to you now, you have all you need.

Enjoy!

2 komentar:

  1. It is a software architecture whose purpose is to facilitate the flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the organization and manage the connections to outside stakeholders.

    ERP Software

    BalasHapus
  2. Plenty of jobs are available to Linux specialists, especially if they are skilled in other LAMP components (the web server Apache, the database management system MySQL, and the web programming language PHP) discussed in previous articles.

    apache jobs

    BalasHapus