OFBiz Tutorial - A Beginners Development Guide for 18.12 (Work in Progress)

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 a developer needs for OFBiz customization.

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

Overview (Introduction to OFBiz)

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.

The tools and architecture of OFBiz make it easy to efficiently develop and maintain enterprise applications. This makes it possible for us as the creators and maintainers of the project to quickly release new functionality and maintain existing functionality without extensive effort. It also makes it easy to customize and extend existing functionality when you have a specific need.

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.

To make sure our functionality is timely and useful we always start by researching public standards and common usage for any component we are working on. This helps us support and use common vocabularies and gives us an instant breadth of options and features that can only be achieved through standards processes and other group efforts. It also opens doors in the future for flexible communication with other systems that are built around the same standards, both inside your organization and in the partner or other organizations.

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.

Reference: http://ofbiz.apache.org/apache-ofbiz-project-overview.html