OFBiz Symposium
 
 
  OFBiz revised

What is Apache OFBiz?

The Apache Open For Business Project is an open source enterprise automation software project licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0. By open source enterprise automation we mean: Open Source ERP, Open Source CRM, Open Source E-Business / E-Commerce, Open Source SCM, Open Source MRP, Open Source CMMS/EAM, and so on.

Apache OFBiz is a foundation and starting point for enterprise solutions, be they for one organization or one million. OFBiz can certainly be used OOTB (out of the box), but if you're looking for something that works really well for that there are many open source projects that do a great job there. OFBiz is great for creating specialized applications for use OOTB by other organizations. OFBiz is also great for organizations that need more than what an OOTB application can offer in order to grow their operations, but find the deployment and maintenance costs of traditional enterprise systems that can handle such things to be unreasonable or unjustifiable.

Being open source under the Apache 2.0 license and driven by a community Apache OFBiz offers both flexibility by design and by access to code, and a solution where you're not alone but rather can work with many others to get things done.

Apache OFBiz offers a great deal of functionality, including:

TRAININGS

OFBiz Framework Development (2-Day Training, Monday and Tuesday)
Target audience includes: developers, architects, test engineers
Presented by: Jacopo Cappellato, Ashish Vijaywargya, David E. Jones

OFBiz Functionality Overview (Full-Day Training, Monday)
Target audience includes: analysts, application designers, higher level developers, and others interested in the base functionality of OFBiz        Presented by: David E. Jones and John Maw

 

WEDNESDAY - NOVEMBER 5

10:30  Panel: The Business of Open Source - Power, Prestige, and Propulsion

11:30  I selected OFBiz for my company, how do I start?  Presented by: Hans Bakker

14:00  Enough Rope to Shoot Yourself in the Foot: Using a Holistic Analysis and Design Approach to Avoid Hanging Your Open Source Based Application Project  Presented by: David E. Jones

15:00  Experiences with Real World OFBiz Projects  Presented by: Olivier Heintz

16:30  Building a Service Business on an Open Source Foundation  Presented by: Mike Bates

17:30  ERP trends, OFBiz position and India Outsourcing  Presented by: Amit Shinde

20:30  Birds-of-a-Feather Session: Who's Who in OFBiz (Past, Present... and Future?)  Meet the people you see on the mailing lists, and introduce yourself.

21:30  Birds-of-a-Feather Session: Panel Discussion: OFBiz Around The World  Panel includes: Hans Bakker, Olivier Heintz, Anil Patel, Amit Shinde, Jacopo Cappellato, Ean Schuessler, Brett Palmer, and others

 

THURSDAY - NOVEMBER 6

09:00  Intuitive interfaces for complex e-commerce (Web 2.0 UIs for dynamic products with complex sub-assemblies)  Presented by: Ean Schuessler

10:00  Panel Discussion: Framework Release Post-Mortem, Future Release Direction Presented by: All Attending Committers, plus others invited -- Discussion of main things worked on for the Framework GA release, how it went, and plans for future framework releases as well as upcoming application releases.

14:00  Automating your OFBiz Application Testing using Selenium  Presented by: Brett Palmer

15:00  OFBiz Framework Tools for Integrated Business Intelligence  Presented by: Jacopo Cappellato

16:30  Accelerating performance with Views and Dynamic Views  Presented by: Adam Heath

17:30  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love OFBiz  Presented by: Martin Anderson and Ed Samour

21:30  Birds-of-a-Feather Session: Brainfood Gun Show: Webslinger + OFBiz  Presented by: Ean Schuessler and Adam Heath --Demonstration of Brainfood Webslinger and creating great looking WYSIWYG user interfaces with it. We've been doing terrible things to OFBiz at Brainfood. Watch in disgust as we demonstrate an unholy marriage of technologies best left separated. Thrill to dark projects ranging from the expansion of Fortune 500 hegemony to the viral dissemination of mind-bending comedy propaganda. Technological scintillation probable. Amusement guaranteed. Mixed drinks consumed, perhaps provided, depending on our ability to evade the notice of conference and hotel staff.


TRAININGS

2-DAY TRAINING: Monday, November 3 and Tuesday November 4

OFBiz Framework Development
Target audience includes: developers, architects, test engineers
Presented by: Jacopo Cappellato, Ashish Vijaywargya, David E. Jones

Day one will include an overview of the OFBiz Framework and all of the primary recommended tools, including the Control Servlet, Screen Widget, Form Widget, Menu and Tree Widgets, the Service Engine, the simple-method scripting language, and the Entity Engine

Day two will include more depth on the framework tools discussed and cover other recommended tools including FreeMarker, Groovy, etc, and how they are used in the framework; we will also discuss deployment of OFBiz and the component architecture and organization of the project.

Attendees will receive a copy of the OFBiz Framework Quick Reference Book from Hotwax Media, and other relevant materials.

Jacopo Cappellato - Jacopo works as a software analyst for HotWax Media. Based in Italy, Jacopo began participating in the Apache Open For Business Project (OFBiz) in 2003 and is now a committer and member of the OFBiz Project Management Committee. Jacopo is also a member of the Apache Software Foundation. Prior to his involvement with HotWax Media, Jacopo participated in several ERP projects for his company, TAU Informatica. He graduated from the University of Padova with a B.A. in Computer Science Engineering.

Ashish Vijaywargiya - Ashish began his career as a software developer with Aditisoft Solutions & Consulting Services Pvt. Ltd. (now HotWax Media Pvt. Ltd.) in 2003, and is now V.P. Operations. Ashish is the local manager of offshore development efforts for HotWax Media. With an emphasis on providing training both to internal HotWax Media employees as well as to clients, Ashish has worked on a variety of projects for clients in North America, Europe and India. He has been working with Apache OFBiz since 2003, and became a project committer in 2007. Ashish graduated in 2003 from RGPV University, Bhopal (M.P) India, with a Bachelor of Engineering (B.E) degree in Computer Science.

David E. Jones - A co-creator of the Apache Open For Business Project (OFBiz), David is now the Vice President representing the project at the Apache Software Foundation. In addition to being heavily involved in the maintenance and development of the open source project, David has provided enterprise software architecture and development services based on OFBiz to organizations including British Telecom, United Airlines, and dozens of smaller organizations. David has presented on OFBiz at national and international conferences including JavaOne, SIPA (Thailand), and BIOS (Finland). He holds a Computer Science degree from Brigham Young University.

 

FULL-DAY TRAINING: Monday, November 3

OFBiz Functionality Overview
Target audience includes: analysts, application designers, higher level developers, and others interested in the base functionality of OFBiz
Presented by: David E. Jones and John Maw

Will include discussion of design objectives for the OFBiz Base Applications, and some introduction to the Special Purpose applications. Covers highlights of the OFBiz data model and corresponding application functionality. Functional areas to be covered include general ERP, CRM, and ecommerce functionality.

Attendees will receive a copy of the Complete OFBiz Data Model Diagrams Book from Hotwax Media.

David E. Jones - A co-creator of the Apache Open For Business Project (OFBiz), David is now the Vice President representing the project at the Apache Software Foundation. In addition to being heavily involved in the maintenance and development of the open source project, David has provided enterprise software architecture and development services based on OFBiz to organizations including British Telecom, United Airlines, and dozens of smaller organizations. David has presented on OFBiz at national and international conferences including JavaOne, SIPA (Thailand), and BIOS (Finland). He holds a Computer Science degree from Brigham Young University.

John Maw - John is a Business Analyst at Hotwax Media, specializing in OFBiz implementation. He has a decade of experience in marketing & sales, ERP, data visualization and business development in the medical, hospitality and internet technology industries. John graduated from the University of Utah with a B.A. in Fine Arts and English, and holds a Masters of Business Administration in Technology Management and Commercialization from Westminster College.


SYMPOSIUM SESSIONS

WEDNESDAY - November 5
10:30
Panel: The Business of Open Source - Power, Prestige, and Propulsion


11:30
I selected OFBiz for my company, how do I start?
Presented by: Hans Bakker

Many, medium to most smaller companies are asking us this question what is next? An outline will be given how to answer this question, from information gathering until a project plan, the implementation and the introduction into the organization. Part of the presentation will show you how to use OFBiz to support this activity.
Hans Bakker - Hans (J.C) Bakker has more than 30 years experience in IT related functions and is currently the founder/CEO of AntWebsystems Co.Ltd in Thailand. He is an active advocate of Apache OFBiz and open source in general and provides presentations to local, EU and US organizations regularly. AntWebsystems is an outsourcing software development company which specializes in providing services around the Apache OFBiz ERP system. The company is servicing companies in the US and Europe and is working with a number of partners to be able to provide local support. Previous to this position he leaded an Internet services company in the Netherlands providing content management products for the dutch market. During the first half of the nineties, he worked for a large record company where he developed, with a team of programmers, an artist royalty system for 4 countries in Europe and in the US. During the eighties he coordinated for a US multinational the software change management of a large team of programmers in Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium and the US.


14:00
Enough Rope to Shoot Yourself in the Foot: Using a Holistic Analysis and Design Approach to Avoid Hanging Your Open Source Based Application Project
Presented by: David E. Jones

There are excellent open source code bases available for every sort of application infrastructure and even ready to use enterprise automation components. These commodity software elements give developers more flexibility and efficiency than has ever been possible before. Business and personal objectives can be automated with so much ease that efforts more and more tend to succeed or fail in spectacular ways. Most projects succeed or fail before development begins, or because of factors that have little to do with development, even though they are usually not recognized until late in the development process where the rubber really hits the road. With so much power and so much variability some understanding of good analysis, design and development practices and common missteps is invaluable.

This presentation will cover recommended artifacts and processes to facilitate communication and groups efforts and move from gathering and formalizing general concepts and ideas all the way through implementation and testing using a business process focused approach. The approach presented is a complete process and set of artifacts that ties together many common tools in a consistent and easy to follow way, even for large groups. The artifacts include common tools such as use cases and stories that are often misapplied or used ineffectively because of a lack of definition and understanding of what those artifacts are for and how they will be used. We will also discuss how certain artifacts and steps can be skipped for efforts with fewer requirements and fewer people, with a focus on the ones that make the biggest difference. This presentation will include discussion of the transition from design to implementation in terms of the Apache Open For Business Project, but all analysis and design artifacts discussed outside of implementation are applicable to any technology or set of systems.

David E. Jones - A co-creator of the Apache Open For Business Project (OFBiz), David is now the Vice President representing the project at the Apache Software Foundation. In addition to being heavily involved in the maintenance and development of the open source project, David has provided enterprise software architecture and development services based on OFBiz to organizations including British Telecom, United Airlines, and dozens of smaller organizations. David has presented on OFBiz at national and international conferences including JavaOne, SIPA (Thailand), and BIOS (Finland). He holds a Computer Science degree from Brigham Young University.


15:00
Experiences with Real World OFBiz Projects
Presented by: Olivier Heintz

OFBiz project is for all type of company, from very large company head-office with multiple subsidiary, 40,000 employee, a MIT department to SME with 50 employee and no dedicate people for MIT. This presentation will describe one project for each extreme.

The large company project has started in November 2007 in the head quarter and in January 2008 in a subsidiary, currently some sub-project are still actives. In this organization, head office solution are not mandatory for the subsidiary, they can choose their MIT solution and how to deploy and how to be supported. This project is drived by eCommerce, but the warehouse management project was a large one too (6 month, 4 full time). Company has build a internal community around all subproject to continue to be drive by the business on a down to top approach. Each new sub-project which starts demonstrate the relevance of the solution

The SME project is a ERP migration from a standard solution (BaaN) to a more free-sofware solution. OFBiz has been deployed with a OOTB extention, Order, Facility, Manufacturing, Accounting have been implemented in 7 month (January to July 2006). Consulting was for training, parameters assistance, usage definition assistance, data migration and some development too but only few days (less than 30d) and all development have been reversed to the community to be sure to have at the end of the prooject a standard solution. From the go day with ofbiz, company continue to increase number of functionalities they use as they need it.

Olivier Heintz - Olivier Heintz is a French Applicative and integration Architect dedicated to OFBiz solution since 2003. He has managed multiple implementation project and contributed to OFbiz and an OOTB (out of the box) extension to Ofbiz, and to develop the OFBiz community in France. In 2004, he has created "Nereide" a service and consulting company dedicated to Free Software ERP implementation in France.
Previously he was a senior manager in CSC company, in charge on ERP - eAI integration and Baan technical integration team. He has more than 20 years of experience in manufacturing IT management and he manages ERP project since 1994, these core skill are Supply chain management, shop floor control, wip and inventory integration and accounting.


16:30
Building a Service Business on an Open Source Foundation
Presented by: Mike Bates

Mike will discuss the experience of building a services business around Apache Open for Business, sharing tactics that have been successful as well as pitfalls to be avoided. In a presentation that is less technical and more oriented toward business people, topics will include selecting the type(s) of projects to target, supporting appropriate internal groups and processes, getting the word out, negotiating contracts and ownership, making the sale, and the importance of community participation. When done correctly, it is clearly possible to grow a profitable business that is focused around implementation and support of open source software. The more organizations that are able to do this successfully with OFBiz, the larger the market space that will be created, and ultimately the more possibilities there will be for any organization interested in implementing OFBiz for its clients.

Mike Bates - Mike founded HotWax Media in 1997, and his career in sales, marketing, design and web development spans a dozen years. Mike is focused on business development, acquiring and growing key accounts, and developing a profitable business model around open source software. He has led high-profile projects for numerous national and global brands and has taught web development courses at the graduate level. After graduating Summa Cum Laude from the Monterey Institute of International Studies with a B.A. in International Studies, he earned his MBA in International Management from the Fisher School.


17:30
ERP trends, OFBiz position and India Outsourcing
Presented by: Amit Shinde

Apache OFBiz is an unique Open Source ERP offering and provides a compelling alternative to commercial ERP solutions. We will review current ERP trends and how Open Source projects are being adopted by companies. We will review what makes OFBiz a formidable solution. We will also review India's macro role in outsourcing.

Topics Covered: ERP market overview, key players and trends moving forward; Open source adoption trends by companies and its economic impact; Review of best of open source solutions and what makes Apache OFBiz a formidable and compelling solution; India's macro role in outsourcing; OFBiz offshoring to India and OFBiz adoption trends in India.

Amit Shinde - Amit Shinde is the founder and CEO of Amicon Technologies Pvt. Ltd., a Mumbai, India-based software services company. Amicon provides high-quality, low-cost OFBiz development and maintenance services. Amit did Electronics Engineering from Mumbai University, Masters in Computer Science from Utah State University and Executive-MBA in International Business and Finance from ITM, Mumbai. Amit worked as a Software Engineer for a Utah-based startup and setup their development branch in Mumbai from ground up. Amit and his team of OFBiz developers work closely with US and UK-based clients in providing OFBiz services. Amit has been an active member of the OFBiz community and an OFBiz developer for the last 6 years. Amit loves every aspect of Open Source philosophy and OFBiz tops them all.


20:30
BOF: Who's Who in OFBiz (Past, Present... and Future?)
Meet the people you see on the mailing lists, and introduce yourself.


21:30
BOF: Panel Discussion: OFBiz Around The World
Panel includes: Hans Bakker, Olivier Heintz, Anil Patel, Amit Shinde, Jacopo Cappellato, Ean Schuessler, Brett Palmer, others

 

THURSDAY - November 6

09:30
Intuitive interfaces for complex e-commerce (Web 2.0 UIs for dynamic products with complex sub-assemblies)
Presented by: Ean Schuessler

A lot of e-commerce systems will let you "put the item in the basket" but OFBiz takes things to a whole new level. A single product may drive thousands of top level SKUs that feed into hundreds of thousands of sub-assembly configurations. Prices can be based on a complex bill of materials plan, feed stock costs and service hour rates. This has huge potential for users. Instead of wading through pages of SKU and option codes the user can "click and drag" their way to a finished order. For the developer, however, presenting these options and managing the user experience is a daunting task. In this talk we will cover the powerful product configuration capabilities in the OFBiz e-commerce infrastructure and demonstrate strategies for feeding those options into intuitive interfaces. A familiarity with OFBiz product entities and a tolerance for Google Web Toolkit based RPC is strongly recommended. Aspirin provided.

Ean Schuessler - Ean Schuessler is co-founder, with his brother Erik Schuessler, of Brainfood, Inc., a Dallas, Texas-based digital media consultancy. Brainfood has delivers decision support, knowledge management and e-commerce applications for some of the largest organizations in the world. Ean is a long-time participant in the Debian project and collaborated in the creation of the Debian Social Contract which inspired the Open Source Definition. He first became interested in Free Software Java when he met Tim Wilkinson at the 1996 JavaOne and was an early maintainer of Debian Kaffe packages and contributor to the Pocket Linux project. Ean also served as President of Software in the Public Interest, an umbrella organization that holds property and provides services for Debian and other Free Software organizations.

 


10:30
Building OFBiz Infrastructures
Presented by: Matthew Porter and Craig McElroy


14:00
Automating your OFBiz Application Testing using Selenium
Presented by: Brett Palmer

Junit tests are an excellent tool for testing low level functionality in your application but at the end of the day your user interface (UI) has to work. UI testing has become even more complex with the introduction of AJAX based applications which often means you have to test the application manually. Thankfully there is a new tool for testing web based applications called Selenium. Selenium is not another browser emulator but instead runs inside the browser. This allows you to get real feedback on what your customers will see when they use your application. Selenium supports Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox, and Safari browsers.

Topics Covered: Using Selenium IDE to record your test scripts; Creating data driven tests using Selenium XML (a Selenium RC extension); Automating your Selenium tests; Scaling your testing with Selenium Grid; Strategies for unit, application, system, and performance testing your OFBiz applications

Brett Palmer - Brett has been developing software professionally for the past 15 years. He currently works as a software consultant helping companies and governments implement large ERP systems. He has been developing custom business applications using Open for Business (OFBiz) since 2002. For the 5 years, Brett has been working on several offshore projects combining software developers in the US with offshore teams working in India. Brett holds an Electrical Engineering degree and a Masters of Business Administration from Brigham Young University. He also holds a Masters in Computer Science from Utah State University.


15:00
OFBiz Framework Tools for Integrated Business Intelligence
Presented by: Jacopo Cappellato

Dimensional modeling has become the most widely accepted approach for data warehouse design. The presentation will introduce some of the most important dimensional modeling techniques and best practices, together with the OFBiz Framework tools that implement them and can be used to build and maintain an OFBiz dimensional data model fully integrated and synchronized with the OFBiz transactional data model; the simple yet complete prototype that comes with OFBiz will be described as well to illustrate the complete process from data model definition (dimensions, fact tables and star schemas), to data processing (ETL) and creation of a simple dimensional report.

Jacopo Cappellato - Jacopo works as a software analyst for HotWax Media. Based in Italy, Jacopo began participating in the Apache Open For Business Project (OFBiz) in 2003 and is now a committer and member of the OFBiz Project Management Committee. Jacopo is also a member of the Apache Software Foundation. Prior to his involvement with HotWax Media, Jacopo participated in several ERP projects for his company, TAU Informatica. He graduated from the University of Padova with a B.A. in Computer Science Engineering.


16:30
Accelerating performance with Views and Dynamic Views
Presented by: Adam Heath

Databases are designed to store vast amounts of data, and allow for relative extraction of any parts of that data. However, when doing nested loops, the database has to open/close/re-read whatever cache statistics it maintains for each sub-query. There is also a per-request overhead. This does not allow the database to do what it does best; optimizing retrieval. Since the nested queries come in separately, the database does not know the access pattern, so has to rebuild it's query plan, reopen tables, open/close any associated locks, etc.

This is not efficient. Discussion will entail being able to recognize such access patterns, and to reduce the number of separate delegator.find calls. As an example, existing code in OfBiz will be modified in the second half of the talk. Sub-components of this talk will be restricting the set of returned fields in the query to the bare minimum required, to handle the calling codes requirements, and to allow for proper chained cache clearing.

Topics Covered: Recognizing nested query access patterns; Converting code to a dynamic or normal view; Reducing the set of returned fields, but still allow the cache system to do it's magic; Making use of org.ofbiz.entity.cache.Cache.put(Object), to save time from having to rebuild complex object graphs.

Adam Heath - Adam Moved to Texas, USA from Michigan in 1998 at the age of 24. Started working for Brainfood in September, 1998, and has worked there since. Adam started programming as a teenager. Adam got involved with Debian GNU/Linux in December 1997. Still a member. Fixed several critical bugs in dpkg, ran it under profiling, and sped parts of it up orders of magnitude. Made debbugs use a hash directory layout. Have committed code into kaffe. Added support to OfBiz for automatically clearing out caches of view entities when the real entities are updated. Fell in love with Java Concurrency Programming in Practice; modified Webslinger to not be non-blocking in most areas. Added generics markup to base-line OfBiz.


17:30
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love OFBiz
Presented by: Martin Anderson and Ed Samour

As a Web agency, we've learned to make OFBiz meet the needs of a diverse roster of e-commerce clients. Taking lessons learned from our usability experts, analytics, and observations of industry trends, we have become experts at adapting OFBiz to suit their needs. In this session, we'll discuss topics such as one-step checkout, Ajax-oriented UI design, and the impact of multivariate testing.


20:30
BOF: Brainfood Gun Show: Webslinger + OFBiz
Presented by: Ean Schuessler and Adam Heath

Demonstration of Brainfood Webslinger and creating great looking WYSIWYG user interfaces with it. We've been doing terrible things to OFBiz at Brainfood. Watch in disgust as we demonstrate an unholy marriage of technologies best left separated. Thrill to dark projects ranging from the expansion of Fortune 500 hegemony to the viral dissemination of mind-bending comedy propaganda. Technological scintillation probable. Amusement guaranteed. Mixed drinks consumed, perhaps provided, depending on our ability to evade the notice of conference and hotel staff.


21:30
BOF: Panel Discussion: Framework Release Post-Mortem, Future Release Direction
Presented by: All Attending Committers, plus others invited

Discussion of main things worked on for the Framework GA release, how it went, and plans for future framework releases as well as upcoming application releases.