opentaps Quarterly Update

We've been busy! Now that we're past version 1.0, we had a chance to make some fundamental improvements to opentaps for a long-term. We have begun to develop a new domain driven architecture for future versions of opentaps. This object-oriented architecture will make it easier for you to customize and extend opentaps or to combine it with other applications. It will also make it easier for us to develop opentaps and help it continue to grow.

opentaps Analytics is also coming along nicely. You are now able to slice and dice customer, order, and return data by over a dozen different ways, including by country, by brand, by month of the year, and by category. You're also able to look at the lifetime value of your customers from all these different angles. We are completing development of an automated query generator for JasperReports which will allow us to create a lot of reports quickly and easily. (See the screenshots.)

In addition, we've made the following improvements:

• A maintenance release of opentaps 1.0.1
• A new query tool to make querying and reporting easier to develop
• A POJO (Plain Old Java Object) Service Engine for mounting business logic written in standard Java objects (beans) in the service engine.
• Support for order management and invoicing of services
• Support for kerberos single sign-on
• Improvements to data importing, order entry, manufacturing, and warehouse management
• And last but not least, thanks for a community contributors, a translation of opentaps to Bulgarian and new documentation pages for opentaps in Spanish and Chinese.

Coming Soon

These are some of the additional enhancements planned in the next few months:

• Ability to deploy opentaps on JBoss
• Support for LDAP authentication
• Better Ajax look up interfaces
• Improved marketing features, including customer segmentation and Recency, Frequency, Monetary (RFM) analysis

A New opentaps

Development of opentaps will continue towards version 1.4 using the current ofbiz-based framework in the next few months. The coding style will become more domain-driven, object-oriented as our domain driven architecture becomes more established. Later this year, we will begin developing a new framework for opentaps 2.0. This new framework will be fully compatible with existing and future applications built on ofbiz, but it will rest upon a stronger Java J2EE foundation and allow us to incorporate many other open source projects into opentaps. This will allow us to expand opentaps into whole new horizons much more easily than ever before. We can't wait!

Finally, a special thanks to Simon Zhao, Juan Gimenez, Ivan Popov and the Tooleast team, and Skip Dever for their contributions to opentaps in the last few months.