Adempiere

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Adempiere is an Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP software released under an open source software license. The word Adempiere (pronounced ah-DEHM-pyeh-reh) in Italian means "to fulfill" or "to accomplish".

The software is licensed under the GNU General Public License, and thus can also be described as free software.

History

The Adempiere project was created in September 2006. Disagreement between the open-source developer community that formed around the Compiere open-source ERP software and the project's corporate sponsor ultimately led to the creation of Adempiere as a fork of Compiere. ^[1] Within weeks of the fork, ADempiere reached the top five of the SourceForge.net rankings. This activity provides a measure of both the size of its developer community and also its impact on the open source ERP software market.

Goals of this project

The goal of the Adempiere project is the creation of a community-developed and supported open source business solution. The Adempiere community follows the open-source model of the Bazaar described in Eric Raymond' article The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

Business functionality

The following business areas are addressed by the Adempiere application:

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Supply Chain Management (SCM)
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Financial Performance Analysis
Integrated Point of sale (POS) solution
Integrated Web Store
Material Requirements Planning (or Manufacturing Resource Planning, in beta for Release 3.5), contributed by the Libero project.

Project structure

All community members are entitled to their say in the project discussion forums. For practical purposes, the project is governed by a council of contributors. A leader is nominated from this council to act as overall project manager. The role of the Adempiere Council is to:

Support decisions of the leader.
Accept contributions.
Define the roadmap.
Review and approve specifications.
Vote for new functionalities.
Approve changes to core.

Technology

Adempiere is developed with J2EE technology, specifically utilizing the JBoss application server. Currently database support is restricted to Oracle and PostgreSQL.

Architecture

Adempiere inherited the Data Dictionary from the Compiere project. This architecture extends the Data Dictionary concept into the application; thus the application's entities, their validation rules and screen layout can be controlled from within the application itself. In practice, this means that customization of the application can be done without new coding. A Workflow Management Coalition and Object Management Group standards based workflow engine is utilized to provide Business Process Management. These features allow for the rapid customization of the application to a business needs.