Ofbiz Newbie Needs Guidance

[Arpit Gadle <ga...@gmail.com>]

Hello Everyone,

I am a newbie to Ofbiz. I am having 4 yrs of exp in Java Technology and
MySQL database.
Recently I have been assigned a task by the company to develop ERP using
Ofbiz. I had installed and developed a demoapp ofbiz component successfully
and also configured Ofbiz installation with MySQL. I had gone through the
ofbiz core components and found that I cannot  reuse and also cannot extend
those components as our requirement is very complex and flexible.

I would like to ask you guys few things

1) Can I develop whole new ERP from ground-zero using Ofbiz (as i
created demoapp)?
2) How can Ofbiz will help me as I won't be using any core components?
3) Can I create and use a separate database for the development other than
ofbiz,ofbizolap and ofbiztenant?
4) We are having a MySQL DBA with us who will be designing the new ERP
database. Are there any rules or conventions to follow when working with
Ofbiz.


I apologize If I had made some mistakes or

asked some questions not pertaining to this mailing list.

Any help is greatly appreciated

Thanks & Regards,

Arpit Gadle

Re: Ofbiz Newbie Needs Guidance

[Paul Foxworthy <pa...@cohsoft.com.au>]

Hi Arpit,

If you use just the framework part of OFBiz, you can create pretty much any
web application. You can think of the framework as another web application
framework, something like Spring, Struts and so on. For example, Atlassian's
Jira product is not in any way an ERP system, but uses the OFBiz framework.

If you like what you've seen of the OFBiz way, using the framework is a
possibility, and yes, you could reinvent a different ERP system based on the
framework.

That said, I find it hard to believe that nothing in OFBiz would be relevant
to an ERP application. Surely your application will deal with Parties,
Products, Services, Orders, Invoices, Payments, Inventory and so on. I
suggest you reconsider *extending* OFBiz instead of rewriting it. If you
haven't read The Data Model Resource Book
(https://cwiki.apache.org/OFBADMIN/ofbiz-related-books.html), I strongly
suggest you do before embarking on defining your entities, and that applies
whether or not you do decide to rewrite. OFBiz's data model is based on the
book, although there are differences.

Have you looked at the services in OFBiz separately from the screens in the
demo application? The demo is just that, a demo and not a finished
application. It tends to expose all the knobs and dials when for a given
application you would be happy to hide away some portion of them. So I would
expect that you would vary screens, remove some, and change the workflow of
others. But the screens would call on services, and there would be less
changes there.

I understand you would want your own entities, and that is fine. But if they
have relationships to standard OFBiz entities like Party, why not store them
in the ofbiz database?

As for working with your DBA: model the entities first. OFBiz will
automatically create tables to persist entity data, so there should be less
work for your DBA to do. The Data Model Resource Book will give you some
ideas about conventions. There are conventions for types of entities and
additional attributes, see the discussion at
https://cwiki.apache.org/OFBTECH/general-entity-overview.html and look for
examples in OFBiz.

Hope that helps.

Regards

Paul Foxworthy


Arpit Gadle wrote
> Hello Everyone,
> 
> I am a newbie to Ofbiz. I am having 4 yrs of exp in Java Technology and
> MySQL database.
> Recently I have been assigned a task by the company to develop ERP using
> Ofbiz. I had installed and developed a demoapp ofbiz component
> successfully
> and also configured Ofbiz installation with MySQL. I had gone through the
> ofbiz core components and found that I cannot  reuse and also cannot
> extend
> those components as our requirement is very complex and flexible.
> 
> I would like to ask you guys few things
> 
> 1) Can I develop whole new ERP from ground-zero using Ofbiz (as i
> created demoapp)?
> 2) How can Ofbiz will help me as I won't be using any core components?
> 3) Can I create and use a separate database for the development other than
> ofbiz,ofbizolap and ofbiztenant?
> 4) We are having a MySQL DBA with us who will be designing the new ERP
> database. Are there any rules or conventions to follow when working with
> Ofbiz.
> 
> 
> I apologize If I had made some mistakes or
> 
> asked some questions not pertaining to this mailing list.
> 
> Any help is greatly appreciated
> 
> Thanks & Regards,
> 
> Arpit Gadle





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