The Open For Business Project
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The Open For Business Project - Release Notes

Written By: David E. Jones jonesde@ofbiz.org, Andy Zeneski jaz@ofbiz.org

Table of Contents



CVS - Current


Overview

No overview available. Work in progress.


Release 3.0.0 - 13 March 2004


Overview

This is the long awaited 3.0.0 release. We have been planning on doing this release for quite some time now, but things have been moving so fast (a good thing), especially over the last few months, that there hasn't been much of a chance for new features to stabilize. But now it's here. With this release we are aware of various outstanding issues as can be seen in our issue tracker on the OFBiz java.net site, but in general things are working properly, especially the more mature parts of the system.

One of the biggest changes you will see right away in the 3.0 series is the reorganization of the directory structure and the componentization of the project. If you have ever wondered which entities or services or other artifacts go with which parts of the project you can easily see so right now. Also, if you are using a fully supported application server there is a lot that can be configured much more easily, even to the point where you can drop in a new component into the hot-deploy directory and on start-up all artifacts will be available in the system, including: classpath resources, entity definitions and seed data files, service definitions, and web applications.

Beyond that nearly every part of the project has been updated with new features and enhanced functionality. In addition to significant progress in Manufacturing, WorkEffort, Accounting, and so on we have established all of the basic functionality required to run a fulfillment oriented business including everything from purchasing and receiving to stock moves, picking, packing and shipping. Inventory reservation and issuance are tracked and full support for back ordering is included. It can even send back-order notices according to the FTC guidelines and is smart enough to not only look at what you have in stock, but also the in-coming shipments and it even does an on-the-fly assignment of outstanding back-ordered quantities by the purchase date to see which in-coming shipment would fill the needs of a particular order. And to make your life easier we even have an XML-based UPS integration so you can get exact rates, get tracking codes immediately, and even print UPS labels on-the-fly during packing of shipments. There is even support for serial scales to weigh each package before sending off to get an exact rate.

Administration of Stores is now easier (be it a web store or a physical store) as all store settings are centralized through the Product Store. This includes inventory settings, payment settings, tax and shipping settings, email notification settings, product search keyword overrides, administration roles, catalogs, promotions, and so on.

Another big change included in this release is internationalization and varying levels of localization for different components. This has been a huge effort contributed by various people in various party of the world (special thanks to Olivier Heintz & Co. and many others). The manufacturing module also falls into this category, it was developed and contributed by various parties (special thanks to Jacopo Cappellato and Olivier Heintz).

In general, if you haven't looked at OFBiz in a while you will be amazed at what is new. While we have put some effort into compiling this list of new things, it is still far from complete but should give you a good idea about what is new and improved in OFBiz.

New Features & Improvements

New features and improvements include:


Release 2.1.1 - 06 May 2003


Overview

This is one of those releases you always hope you never have to do, but hey bugs happen. So yes, this is a maintenance release that fixes a number of bugs. There are also a couple of new features, but not many.

Bug Fixes

Bug Fixes include:

New Features & Improvements

New features and improvements include:


Release 2.1.0 - 24 April 2003


Overview

Once again we have another great release. This release includes a number of new features and a major refactoring and cleanup of the ecommerce application. Most of that refactoring and cleanup was part of our move away from JSPs and toward a new presentation view architecture using JPublish, FreeMarker, and BeanShell. As with all components used/included in OFBiz these tools are freely available open source projects with active and accessible development and user communities. Because of all of the new features including this new architecture, this release will not be a maintenance release following the 2.0.x series, but rather a new minor release starting the 2.1.x series.

All of the ecommerce webapp has been changed from the old JSP/Regions architecture to the new JPublish/FreeMarker/BeanShell architecture. The ControlServlet and events are all the same as before, this just replace the "view" portion of the presentation layer. Very few pieces of the other applications have been migrated to this new architecture, but that will be done over the coming months.

Another major new change is the integration with the JOTM transaction manager which is a replacement for Tyrex. This means that a very simple configuration can now be deployed with only a servlet container and a stand-alone transaction manager, and without the difficulties that Tyrex brings with it.

This release is the first that includes our new recommended open source platform which now consists of Jetty and JOTM instead of Tomcat and Tyrex. Jetty makes deployment of OFBiz much easier than it was under Tomcat because there is no longer a need to copy the nearly 100 jar libraries and configuration files into the app server directory as was necessary with Tomcat. In addition to moving to Jetty, we are also introducing the new ofbiz.jar startup program. This new executable jar embeds Jetty/JOTM with OFBiz, auto-sets all classpath and required settings. By running java -jar ofbiz.jar from the root OFBiz directory will fully start OFBiz in a cross-platfrom way.

New Features & Improvements

New features and improvements include: