At the core of Apache OFBiz lies a powerful toolkit facilitating all aspects of software development—the MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework.
The MVC framework is an organizational structure for software. It covers three aspects: data (model), front-end (view or user interface), and logic (controller, the flow of the software). With this powerful toolkit alone, we can build a web-based software quickly. But OFBiz is more than that. OFBiz is also a collection or suite of ready-made ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) components. Many of these components are so reusable and tried and tested, they have become quite core to OFBiz and to businesses that employ OFBiz.
The most prominent and polished aspects in OFBiz are ecommerce, product management, and order processing components. Aside from the commonly used ecommerce and related aspects, OFBiz also has a wide array of ready-made functions . These range from the commonly required accounting facilities to the more specialized manufacturing workflow.
In this chapter, we will be looking at:
Obtaining OFBiz
Compiling and running OFBiz
Taking a quick first tour
Downloading OFBiz requires Subversion (SVN)—a version control system. For now, think of SVN as 'downloader software' that lets us download OFBiz, much like how 'browser software' (for example: IE, Firefox) lets us download TortoiseSVN (for Windows users) from http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads. TortoiseSVN is a graphical SVN client for Windows. It is neatly integrated with the ubiquitous and well-known Windows Explorer.
We only need the SVN client to talk to OFBiz project's SVN server in order to download a copy of OFBiz. We will use TortoiseSVN for the SVN client. Linux users can use the command line SVN client available from the Subversion website.
There is another means of downloading OFBiz—the Nightly Builds release. This is not the way recommended by OFBiz developers. The download method that uses version control software, such as SVN or CVS, is usually reserved for developers. Such a download method lets us check-out the source code that makes up the software (OFBiz in this case). In contrast, the download method meant for general (usually non-technical) audience involves downloading a single file that is usually an all-in-one installer and the software, which is to be installed. An example is the .msi installation file for TortoiseSVN.
OFBiz has so, far been targeted at developers, not the general folks who know or care little about programming software. We will now see how to download OFBiz using the recommended method.