Tuesday, 10 April 2007

Openbravo Green. The next platform.

Green is the codename for the new technological platform of Openbravo. Openbravo Green is built on the strengths of the current release, improving those areas where limitations to the current model have been encountered.

One of the main aspects of Openbravo Green is openness: an open source project, based on proven standards and open source technologies. This will benefit the Openbravo community with a product easier to learn, extend and integrate with other products.

Another important aspect of Openbravo Green is that we do not want to lose all the functionality, developments and knowledge around the current Openbravo platform. We will put all our effort to do the upgrades from previous versions as easy as possible and to ensure the reliability of the upgraded system. In most of the cases you will be able to run the current functionality in Openbravo Green with no changes at all.

I am proud to announce that there is a platform prototype development in progress for Openbravo Green. Currently this prototype is just an example of an Openbravo window that allows to view and edit records of product categories of the Openbravo demo database. In this prototype we are testing all the aspects we want for the Openbravo Green platform: technologies like the Spring framework, Hibernate, Acegi security, Dojo toolkit DWR, and so on. And also we are trying to organize the source code in layers to keep the design of the application as clean as possible. We want to make with this prototype a proof of concept of the Openbravo Green platform and include all the features and requirements we are planning for the Openbravo Green platform. You can have a look at the demo at http://demo.openbravo.com/green/ and if you want to go further you can also check out the source code and give it a try: http://openbravo.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/openbravo/branchs/green/

We are very excited with the opportunity of starting a community-driven development and incorporate all the best that you: developers and users can offer to this development. Everybody who want to be involved in the development of Openbravo Green is welcome. We are looking forward to get feedback from our community regarding Openbravo Green. You can follow the discussions in the Openbravo Green forum: http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=680521

By now there is a proposal available for reviewing and feedback http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/index.php/Design_principles_for_Openbravo_Green until 1st of August 2007. Once the design principles are frozen, we plan to continue with the detailed architecture design documents, which will also be a subject of discussion during a period of time.

See you at the Openbravo Green forum.