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This tutorial is designed for beginners with little or no OFBiz experience. It covers the fundamentals of the OFBiz application development process. The goal is to make a developer conversant with best practices, coding conventions, basic control flow, and all other aspects which that a developer needs for OFBiz customization.

This tutorial will help you in building your first "Demo Application" in OFBiz.

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The architecture alone makes it easier for you to customize the applications to your needs, but many of the best flexibility points in the system would be meaningless and even impossible if the system was not distributed as open-source software. OFBiz is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0 (ASL2) which grants you the right to customize, extend, modify, repackage, resell, and many other potential uses of the system.

No restrictions are placed on these activities because we feel that they are necessary for the effective use of this type of software. Unlike other open-source licenses, such as the GPL, your changes do not have to be released as open-source. There are obvious benefits to contributing certain improvements, fixes, and additions back to the core project, but some changes will involve proprietary or confidential information that must not be released to the public. For this reason, OFBiz uses the ASL2 which does not require this. The only required thing is to not remove the "copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices" you find in files. For more information on open source licenses see the Open Source Initiative (OSI) website at www.opensource.org.

Another benefit of this open-source model is that we receive constant feedback from those who are using the software. We have received countless bug fixes, improvement suggestions, and best-practice business advice from users and potential users of OFBiz. Many of the greatest features in the project were inspired by some comments or suggestions sent to the mailing lists associated with the project. With dozens of organizations using the software and probably hundreds of deployed sites using one piece or another of the project we generally get 20-30 emails each day about the project.

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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 the management of everything from parties and products to accounting, customer service, and internal resource and asset management.

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If you haven't already checkout Apache OFBiz Framework on your machine, let's do it. Anyone can checkout or browse the source code in the OFBiz public GIT repository. If you don't have Git, to install it you can go here for instructions.

To checkout the To clone the source code, simply use the following command (if you are using a GUI client, configure it appropriately):

• trunk framework: $  $ git clone clone https://gitbox.apache.org/repos/asf/ofbiz-framework.git ofbiz-framework
  or https://github.com/apache/ofbiz-framework.git ofbiz-framework

Since the trunk was split into ofbiz-framework and ofbiz-plugins, the specialpurpose and hot-deploy directories have disappeared.
New components must be put in a plugins directory which works as was the hot-deploy directory.

For OFBiz existing components, check them out using the Gradle tasks below. or the GIT command

1.Checkout via Gradle tasks

To get all components use pullAllPluginsSource(This command should be run from ofbiz-framework home). Beware this deletes a previously existing plugins directory.

For Linux/Mac: $ ./gradlew pullAllPluginsSource
For Windows: > gradlew pullAllPluginsSource

2.Checkout via GIT command(Following commands should be run from ofbiz-framework home)

• ofbiz-plugins: $ git clone https://github.com/apache/ofbiz-plugins.git plugins

For more details refer Apache OFBiz Source Repository page.

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Now you are ready to dive in. Welcome to OFBiz world.