ADempiere has been ported to IBM i Operating System and IBM WebSphere Application Server. This port was done by Grant Quick, a student at the University of Technology, Sydney in collaboration with the IBM Innovation Centre for Business Partners. Grant Quick has put up his paper on his findings on his website.
ADempiere is the leading open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool. These are enterprise-wide tools that orchestrate the operations of a business. An ERP can come with tools for generating financial reports, managing inventory, analysing the performance of employees, sharing information with other companies, etc. When wielded correctly, these things have the opportunity to drive an organisation’s efficiency. Imagine the waste, excess work and lost time you could save if your organisation could manage, schedule and negotiate transactions with other organisations seamlessly.
In the ERP field, ADempiere is particularly interesting because it is open source. That means that developers, enterprises, system integrators, anyone and everyone can take it free of charge and make their own modifications to it. Consultants can create consulting practices by offering “Design, Build, Operate” services. Trainers can develop courseware and train users how to use it, consultants how to consult with it, government officials to interpret its data.
Skip forward to page 63 and you find this gem …
Whilst the current OSGi developments will make it significantly easier to integrate new plugins with the core product, it will still leave a lot of work to be completed if the decision is made to create an SOA. The entire application suite would need to be restructured so that useful services could be externally exposed to other applications and swapped out for components supplied by other vendors. This would be a large undertaking and require the support of the whole community. Although OSGi may be used for the backbone of an SOA implementation, it may prove beneficial to use a more extensive and flexible framework such as J2EE. Since an architectural overhaul is scheduled for version 4.1 of ADempiere, discussion on adopting an SOA needs to begin in the community soon.I think transitioning to a SOA model could enhance ADempiere in versions to come. Here’s looking forward to 4.1! Continue reading