Openbravo 2.50: The Developers Guide

Openbravo 2.50 has been released a few months ago, so some of you may have already noticed that as part of this release we created a completely new developers guide. This blog is to help spread the word even further that the developers guide is a great resource of information available for those of you who are customizing or developing on Openbravo 2.50.

The developers guide consists of different sections providing valuable information for starting developers, medium experienced as well as Openbravo expert developers. Here is an overview of these sections.

The introduction is relevant when starting development with Openbravo (see the Development Environment and Development Concepts sections) and for developers wanting to know more about the changes from 2.40 to 2.50 (see what's new and howto upgrade).

The how-to sections describe Openbravo development topics using a focused development goal. There are how-tos on modularity, extending the datamodel, adding windows and webservices, the data access layer and more.

The fundamentals and concepts chapter gives a detailed description of all relevant Openbravo ERP development concepts. The content ranges from common development topics (such as the project structure, build tasks) to modularity and the application dictionary. Each of the main layers of the application is discussed: database, middle-tier and web-tier with webservices.

The reference section consists of a detailed description of the data model from different points of view: the database model, the entity model, the hibernate mapping and the REST XML Schema. In addition javadoc and other reference-like topics are discussed in this section.

The examples section contains examples of existing code in the Openbravo ERP application. The purpose of this chapter is to give directions for the reader to study current Openbravo code and use that as the basis for own custom code

A very useful section is the tips and tricks section. The tips and tricks are based on experience and user questions and solutions in the forums.

I hope that the developers guide is useful for you as a developer. Feel free to give feedback on the guide, especially if certain parts can be improved or if you miss certain information.

Happy reading!