Apache OFBiz Project Overview

Written The Open For Business Project - General OverviewWritten By: David E. Jones, jonesde@ofbiz.org

Purpose

The Purpose of this document is to give you an overview of the Open For Business Project from a business perspective. It will review some of the principles and motivations behind the project, major application components, and a brief explanation of the system's technical organization.

The descriptions of functionality in this document are meant to give you a high level overview of the system. For more detailed information you can look over the Feature List and related documents.

Introduction

Open For Business (OFBiz) is a suite of enterprise applications built on a common architecture using common data, logic and process components. The loosely coupled nature of the applications makes these components easy to understand, extend and customize.

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The applications and application components that come with the system provide you with a broad and flexible basis that can be used as-is with the best-practices based designs, or customized to your own special needs. The applications facilitate management of everything from parties and products to accounting, customer service and internal resource and asset management. Which brings us to the next topic...

Major Application Components

Through collaboration in a large community and an ongoing development effort OFBiz hopes to include features that automate every aspect of enterprise information and knowledge. Early in the development and design of the project we were searching for a good initial data model to use as a foundation for the system.

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The Human Resources entities are used to keep track of positions, responsibilities, skills, employment, termination, benefits, training, pay grades and payroll preferences, performance reviews, resumes and applications, and other Human Resources related information.

Architecture and System Organization

Architecture is really just a fancy word for the organization and composition of application components. There are many different "tools" available as part of Java, J2EE and the OFBiz Core Framework that can be used together to efficiently and effectively organize data and business logic, to provide interfaces to other systems, and to create user interfaces for humans to interact with the system.

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To make it easier to use these Core Framework tools another component called an XML Mini-Language has been created that allows an engineer or other user to create an XML file with simple, well-defined instructions that the system can understand and execute. Expressing logic in a Mini-Lang "simple-method" often requires only one third as much code as an equivalent Java method and is much easier to read and modify for semi-technical users. Processing form input, composing services into larger services, and interacting with data in the database are common things that can be done easily with this tool.

Conclusion

The Open For Business Project is a collaborative effort involving a large group of users and developers and is moderated by a small central team. The applications and framework components are being used in a wide variety of businesses and applications and are customized heavily in many circumstances to meet the needs of the organizations using the software.

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