First look at IDempiere

Problem Statement:

As IDempiere GA release will be annouced very soon, interest is growing among the ERP community members. Since it has been cloned from ADempiere and many of us will be curious know what it offers.

Scope:

This article covers small insight about IDempiere and compares with ADempiere in different perspectives.

Detail:

• FOSS:
  Both ADempiere and IDempiere are FOSS based. You can download application and its codebase. You can install them anywhere and make your customization as per custom need. There is no absolute difference between these two frames in terms FOSS.
• Technology :
  Adempiere is J2EE application. It uses ZK3.6 for its web based platform. IDempiere is OSGI based application, which allows modularity in a big way. IDempiere still uses J2EE concepts, but OSGI was added to bring in modularity in the application. It uses ZK6 for its web based platform. As ZK6 is touch enabled, it is well positioned to support mobile user base. Java does not support modularity inherently at current state. There are proposals to add modularity as core functionality, but it is in very early stage.
• Architecture :
  ADempiere is based on famous 3 tier architecture. IDempiere is based on OSGI architecture. ADempiere code is re-factored as per OSGI standards. As OSGI provides modularity, IDempiere inherits it. New enhancements can be developed as plugins and plugins can be activated and deactivated dynamically in real time.
• Ease of development:
  As ADempiere development is based on well known technologies, understanding code and making changes is easier and faster. As IDempiere is based on OSGI technology which is spreading now among the development community, it takes little more time to build comfort around this area. Once developer is comfortable on OSGI technology, the development and customization will speed up. But development environment setup and ease of debugging in IDempiere is simpler compared to ADempiere.
• Continuous Integration Support:
  Both IDempiere and ADempiere provides continuous Integration support. In ADempiere we need to invoke ant scripts and in IDempiere we need to invoke Buckminster based cspecs or mspecs.
• Automation Testing Support:
  ADempiere supports partial support for selenium automation testing. Same has been ported to IDempiere as well. The fitness automation testing tool is implicitly integrated in IDempiere.
• Migration :
  2Pack in IDempiere has been improved a lot with the introduction of UUID and IDempiere is enhanced to persist the migration scripts that are already applied. It enables IDempiere to apply the migration scripts selectively.
• Usability Changes:
  In terms of functionality, IDempiere has brought many new changes and most of the changes make a lot of sense in the real business environment. I could relate most of the new features that are in IDempiere to some of the change requests raised by my ADempiere users at least in one or more ADempiere implementation. I will list some of the improvements here

• Mail ID as user name( Configurable)
• Role change after login
• Quick Data entry support
• Horizontal tabs for detailed records
• Form layout improvements
• Import CSV from the toolbar
• Document action from the toolbar
• Tab Editor

Functional Changes:

IDempiere also brought some more functional changes. Here is the list of functional changes

• • GL Journal improvements
  • Configurable Info windows
  • GL Journal generator
  • Reverse accrual improvements
  • Manufacturing lite
  • HR module ( Under progress)

Summary:

While IDempiere certainly looks promising in terms of state of art technologies, community supports, ADempiere still continues to lead the number of open source ERP implementations. It is interesting to see how the ERP community adopts and embraces IDempiere. But it is definitely a good situation for open source ERP world as end user will have one more choice to choose.

Walking Tree promotes Adempiere and IDempiere and we support the users as well as the developers to ensure that the business is able to take complete advantage of their wonderful capabilities. In case you are looking for professional assistance then do visit our website to get in touch with us.

As a contribution Walking Tree hosts latest IDempiere at http://idempiere.walkingtree.in/. It is a nightly build which contains the latest code and migration scripts. This link is available all the time, take complete advantage of this site.