Report for Mar 2009 for OFBiz (Open For Business) as a top level project.

The Apache Open For Business Project (Apache OFBiz) is an open source
enterprise automation software project. By enterprise automation we mean:
ERP, CRM, E-Business / E-Commerce, MRP, SCM, CMMS/EAM, and so on.

We have ONE issue that require Board assistance at this time. Please see the Infrastructure section for details.

Community:

• No new PMC members have been added.
• One new committer has been added: Bruno Busco (2009-01-15).

Project:

• Planning on a release branch around the end of this month (March 2009).
• Significant progress has been made on security issues, especially those particular to webapps (like XSS, XSRF, etc).
• Significant new framework functionality is in place to support user configured pages (portal/portlet style), and user editable content (stored in filesystem, can interact with source repository, supports templating and scripting and such just like previous tools)
• Refinement and fleshing out of business-oriented project functionality is progressing based on the Universal Business Process Library (http://docs.ofbiz.org/x/fRY) mentioned last month. Jira tasks and contributions based on some of this is starting to get into the project.

Infrastructure:

• ISSUE: This issue is related to the non-ASF hosting issues for project resources included in the report last time (Dec 2008), and to a new objective that came from discussion at ApacheCon in New Orleans in Nov 2008. We are working on migrating all OFBiz project management tools to actually run on OFBiz (including software enhancements and data conversion tools), including moving from Confluence to OFBiz and from Jira to OFBiz, and also running a dynamic internationalized project web site in OFBiz. The issue with this is how and where to host it. We didn't get a lot of response from infra about this, and it seems like there isn't really much precedence for this as their are not facilities in place to host this sort of thing, especially just for one project. Various other ASF Members (and some Board members) expressed interest at ApacheCon in hosting more ASF stuff on software that is developed within the ASF, and that is very compatible with what we want to do in OFBiz. In other words, whatever is done now will hopefully mature over the next few months to a point where not only OFBiz can use it for project resources, but other ASF projects can as well. Because various people involved with OFBiz either are hosting companies or work with hosting companies it isn't hard to find a place to host this, even a monitored production environment, but unless we somehow made that official ASF infrastructure there are PRC as well as survivability issues with it. Comments and recommendations from the board are needed to help guide this effort. It will be a little while, probably at least until the next board report (3 months from now), before we are ready to try anything on a production scale to replace existing OFBiz project resources.