opentaps Quarterly Update

During the last few months, we've continue to improve the technical foundation of opentaps in two important directions. In the backend, we've migrated key portions of our customer, order, inventory, and general ledger code to the new domain driven architecture. In the process, we've been able to make the underlying code more flexible and easier to maintain and improve its performance. (See this example.)

In the front end, we have started to integrate the Google Web Toolkit into opentaps to build more friendly user interfaces. This toolkit will allow us to turn our web forms into interactive widgets that look and feel like a more responsive desktop application. For example, take a look at this Flash demo, and you will see a widget which acts as its own application. It gets data from opentaps, checks user input, and connects to the server without affecting the rest of your screen. The lists of results are also more dynamic: you can sort them, show or hide fields, and rearrange the layout. The interface is also a lot faster and smoother.

Some other recent enhancements include:

• Ability for migrating data from NetSuite
• Support for tracking inventory at standard costs
• Better support for orders with multiple shipping destinations
• Additional reports and enhanced user interfaces in opentaps analytics
• Upgrade of opentaps analytics to Pentaho 1.7
• opentaps 1.0.2 released.

Looking ahead

In the next few months, our key initiatives will be integrating the Google Web Toolkit more smoothly into opentaps to make building user-friendly web applications as easy as possible for you. Separately, we will also be looking to improve on the business execution, or services, layer of opentaps. Our goal is to provide you with better support for job scheduling, workflow management, and remote Web services.