User:Tapwag/sandbox/metasfresh

metasfresh is an Open Source/ Free Software Enterprise Ressource Planning (ERP) software designed and developed for Small and mediumsized companies (SMEs).

Overview
The metasfresh ERP Software can be used and distributed freely. It does not require a contributor license agreement from partners or contributors. There is no closed source code, and the planning and development happens openly in the community.

metasfresh is an actively maintained fork of ADempiere.

Software & Architecture
metasfresh is written in Java, JavaScript scripting language and works with PostgreSQL  database management system. The development repository is publicly available on GitHub. It is composed of Client and Server components. The main Client is a Java Swing User Interface and available for production environments. Currently a new Web Interface is under development.

Used Technologies:
 * Web-Frontend: HTML5, PostCSS, JavaScript, React, Redux
 * Java-Frontend: Java 8, Swing Java
 * Application Server: Tomcat, Spring Framework, OpenJDK, JasperReports
 * Database: PostgreSQL 9.5
 * Integration: ServiceMix, ActiveMQ, Camel
 * API: REST, JSON, Swagger, Spring Framework, Hazelcast, Elasticsearch, Kibana
 * Mobile Application: Vaadin

Business functionalities/ features
The feature List of metasfresh covers the majority of requirements of medium sized enterprises for ERP Software and is comparable with proprietary ERP Systems.


 * Enterprise Ressource Planning
 * Contract management
 * CRM
 * Supply chain management
 * Distribution resource planning
 * Document automation
 * Manufacturing resource planning
 * Accounts payable
 * Accounts receivable
 * General ledger
 * Sales
 * Purchase
 * Inventory
 * Bank account management
 * Payments management
 * Shipping management
 * Multi-Tenants
 * Multi-Organizations
 * Multi-Language
 * Multi-Currency
 * Multi-Account Schema

History
In September 2006 the founders of metasfresh started with Open Source ERP development as early contributors in the ADempiere ERP Project. They were founder members of the ADempiere Foundation and longtime members of Functional and Technical Team at ADempiere. In industry-specific ERP projects in the SME sector they developed several new features based on ADempiere 3.5.4 and rewrote the majority of ADempiere Code to allow a more maintainable, flexible and scalable Software for midsize companies. Their built up user base demanded shorter and more reliable release cycles to allow more flexibility in providing solutions for their requirements. This, plus the already resulted gap in development compared to the latest ADempiere Codebase was the reason for the team to decide in 2015 to officially fork from ADempiere and proceed the development in a new project called metasfresh.

Since going public on 6th October 2015 the community and development activity has raised fast. Despite the fork's young age, metasfresh is currently one of the most active Open Source ERP Projects worldwide according to OpenHUB Statistics.

Difference to ADempiere Project
After the fork from Compiere, the ADempiere community followed the open-source model of the Bazaar described in Eric Raymond's article The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The community and codebase was growing fast. The development mainly relied on the architecture inherited from Compiere, which had a tight coupling to the database. The architecture in combination with fast growing complexity lead into longer taking release cycles. Additionally the license of ADempiere is GPL 2. Open Source projects with licenses compatible to GPL 2 are getting lesser, so further development will more and more have to rely on own development which is a threat for a competitive development of Open Source enterprise software. With the fork, metasfresh is choosing different approaches. The main aims of the project are:


 * Quality Assurance: Building a modern architecture and decoupling the application from the data layer. This shall allow to extend the automatic Testing possibilities which are a prerequisite for shorter release cycles with extending functionality.
 * Legal: Completely rewriting the ADempiere code, to allow to switch the license from GPL2 to GPL3 to allow to choose among a larger amount of modern Open Source projects for further incorporation and development.
 * Efficiency: Consequent usage of Tools to enable efficient work from requirements analysis over development and testing until build and deployment.
 * Flexibilty: Provide a highly flexible framework for business processes based on a new disposition framework which allows to have functional extension points to allow external systems to bind with metasfresh ERP.

Currently the time between stable releases including bug fixes and new features is 1 week according to the project's release notes.