Book Image

Apache OFBiz Development: The Beginner's Tutorial

By : Jonathon Wong, Rupert Howell
Book Image

Apache OFBiz Development: The Beginner's Tutorial

By: Jonathon Wong, Rupert Howell

Overview of this book

<p>Apache OFBiz (Open For Business) is versatile open-source enterprise automation software that powers many small and medium sized businesses around the world. It incorporates a number of mature applications such as ERP, e-Commerce, MRP and CRM.<br /><br />Built around an MVC framework with common logic, data model and process components, Ofbiz allows existing and bespoke applications to be added through a component-based architecture. Ofbiz includes a mature suite of enterprise applications that integrate and automate a company's many business needs.<br />&nbsp;<br />This easy-to-read book will quickly enable newcomers to get hands-on with OFBiz. It provides an overview of the main modules and employs illustrated examples that show readers how to build exemplary business applications rapidly. Covering the main aspects of the Model-View-Controller framework, the reader will gain a working knowledge of Widgets, Entities, and The Service Engine. The authors also describe how to tweak OFBiz, and offer valuable performance and development tips. By navigating through the flow of OFBiz and providing insight into the thousands of examples that already exist in the core code they have made this book a must-have for anyone looking to get started with OFBiz.</p>
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Apache OFBiz Development
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface
Simple Method User's Guide

Using FreeMarker


FreeMarker is another Open Source project. It is a template engine which has some programming capabilities. For those who are familiar with Velocity (another templating engine), the migration to FreeMarker is easy, as they share many of the same concepts. OFBiz makes great use of FreeMarker's flexibility to display data that has been returned from event and services or lookups performed in the screen widgets actions in different formats, usually XHTML. The separation of the presentation into these FreeMarker templates allows web designers to concentrate solely on the design and layout and keeps their need to know any other programming languages to a minimum. Freemarker Template Language is commonly referred to as FTL, and FreeMarker templates have the file extension .ftl.

Throughout the course of this book, we have used some FreeMarker templates already. The messages.ftl file that has been used in so many of the examples is a very good example of such a file. Let's remind...