metasfresh is an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

free Free may refer to: Concept * Freedom, having the ability to do something, without having to obey anyone/anything * Freethought, a position that beliefs should be formed only on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism * Emancipate, to procur ...

ERP software designed and developed for

SMEs Superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) systems store energy in the magnetic field created by the flow of direct current in a Superconductivity, superconducting coil which has been Cryogenics, cryogenically cooled to a temperature below ...

. metasfresh is an actively maintained fork of ADempiere and 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 happen openly in the community. metasfresh was included in the Top 9 Open Source ERP to consider by opensource.com.

History

In September 2006 the founders of metasfresh started with Open Source ERP development as early contributors in the ADempiere ERP Project. They were founding 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. The user base they built up 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 releasing the code to the public on 6 October 2015 the community and development activity has risen quickly. Despite the fork's young age, metasfresh is currently one of the most active Open Source ERP Projects worldwide according to OpenHUB Statistics.

Technology

Software & Architecture

metasfresh is written in Java, JavaScript scripting language and works with

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

database management system. The development repository is publicly available o
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 PostCSS is a software development tool that uses JavaScript-based plugins to automate routine CSS operations. It was designed by Andrey Sitnik with the idea taking its origin in his front-end work for Evil Martians. Functionality PostCSS ...

, JavaScript,

React REACT or React may refer to: Science and technology *REACT (telescope), a telescope at Fenton Hill Observatory, New Mexico, US Computing * React (JavaScript library) , a JavaScript library for building user interfaces, from Facebook ** React Nati ...

, Redux * Java-Frontend:

Java 8 The Java (programming language), Java language has undergone several changes since Java Development Kit, JDK 1.0 as well as numerous additions of class (computer science), classes and packages to the standard library (computer science), li ...

, Swing Java * Application Server:

Tomcat Tomcat may refer to: Animals * A sexually mature male cat * Paederus, known as in Indonesia Science and technology * Apache Tomcat, an implementation of Java web-server technologies * Beretta 3032 Tomcat, a pistol * Grumman F-14 Tomcat, a fi ...

, Spring Framework, OpenJDK, JasperReports * Database: PostgreSQL 9.5 * Integration: ServiceMix,

RabbitMQ RabbitMQ is an open-source message-broker software (sometimes called message-oriented middleware) that originally implemented the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) and has since been extended with a plug-in architecture to support Str ...

ActiveMQ Apache ActiveMQ is an Open-source software, open source message broker written in Java together with a full Java Message Service (JMS) client. It provides "Enterprise Features" which in this case means fostering the communication from more than on ...

Camel A camel (from: la, camelus and grc-gre, κάμηλος (''kamēlos'') from Hebrew or Phoenician: גָמָל ''gāmāl''.) is an even-toed ungulate in the genus ''Camelus'' that bears distinctive fatty deposits known as "humps" on its back. C ...

* API: REST,

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other ser ...

Swagger A swagger or swagga is a swaggering gait. Swagger also may refer to: * Swagger or swagman, a transient labourer in Australia and New Zealand * Swagger (software), a specification for defining the interface of a REST web service now known as Open ...

, Spring Framework, Hazelcast, Elasticsearch,

Kibana Kibana is a source-available data visualization dashboard software for Elasticsearch, whose free and open source successor in OpenSearch is OpenSearch Dashboards. History It provides visualization capabilities on top of the content indexed o ...

* 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 Resource Planning * Contract management * CRM *

Supply chain management In commerce, supply chain management (SCM) is the management of the flow of goods and services including all processes that transform raw materials into final products between businesses and locations. This can include the movement and stor ...

* Distribution resource planning * Document automation * Manufacturing resource planning * Accounts payable * Accounts receivable * General ledger * Sales * Purchase *

Inventory Inventory (American English) or stock (British English) refers to the goods and materials that a business holds for the ultimate goal of resale, production or utilisation. Inventory management is a discipline primarily about specifying the shap ...

* Bank account management * Payments management * Shipping management * Multi-Tenants * Multi-Organizations * Multi-Language * Multi-Currency * Multi-Account Schema

Differences to the 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 Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary'' (abbreviated ''CatB'') is an essay, and later a book, by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux k ...

. The community and codebase were 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 leads into longer taking release cycles. Additionally, the license of ADempiere is GPL 2. Open Source projects with licenses compatible to GPL 2 are decreasing, so further development will more and more have to rely on own development which is a threat to a competitive development of Open Source enterprise software. With the fork, metasfresh is choosing a different approach. The main aims of the project are: * Quality Assurance: Building a modern architecture and decoupling the application from the data layer. The aim is to 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. * Flexibility: Provide a highly flexible framework for business processes based on a new disposition framework which allows having 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.

History

Technology

Software & Architecture

Business functionalities/ features

Differences to the ADempiere Project

See also

References

External links