HomeDocs & BooksOFBiz Documentation
New Documentation Site
New docs.ofbiz.org Site (Confluence) NOTE: We are planning to eventually move all of this documentation there.
Training Videos
Free OFBiz Framework Introduction provided by Hotwax Media by David E. Jones See the
Hotwax Media site for more information on training, training videos, and materials used in the training. Or go directly to the
Undersun Store.
Configuration Documents
OFBiz Basic Production Setup Guide NOTE: This is a free document meant to help you get going with OFBiz. It is now community maintained and was originally sponsored by
Hotwax Media and
Integral Business Solutions.
Demo and Test Setup & InstallationOFBiz Framework Configuration GuideEntity Engine (database) Configuration GuideService Engine Configuration GuideDocuments on Other Sites
The OFBiz Wiki hosted by Integral Business Solutions Open Source Strategies:
OFBiz Tutorials by Si Chen
OFBiz: An Insider‘s View by Basil Arkasosy
Best Practices
Best Practices GuideGeneral Documents
General Project OverviewEntity OverviewScaling and Performance PlanData Model Documents & Diagrams
Availble HereMain Documentation
Documents & Guides
Framework OverviewEntity Engine GuideService Engine GuideWorkflow Engine GuideData File GuideMini-Languages GuideControl Servlet GuideRegions GuideJSP Tag Library GuideOFBiz Containers XSD (ofbiz-containers.xml)OFBiz Component Load XSD (component-load.xml)OFBiz Component XSD (ofbiz-component.xml)JNDI Server Config XSD (jndiservers.xml)Security Config XSD (security.xml)Entity Engine XML Definitions
Entity Config XSD (entityengine.xml)Entity Group XSD (entitygroup.xml)Entity Model XSD (entitymodel_*.xml)Entity ECAs XSD (eecas_*.xml)Field Type Model XSD (fieldtype*.xml)Service Engine XML Definitions
Service Config XSD (serviceengine.xml)Service Definition XSD (services_*.xml)Service ECAs XSD (secas_*.xml)Service Groups XSD (groups_*.xml)Mini-Language XML Definitions
Simple Methods XSDWebapp Framework XML Definitions
Site Config XSD (controller.xml)Regions Definition XSD (regions.xml)Widget XML Definitions
Form Widget XSDMenu Widget XSDScreen Widget XSDTree Widget XSDOFBiz Related Books
Data Model
The Data Model Resource Book, Revised Edition, Volumes 1 & 2 To help us provide a strong data model foundation for the project we are using entity designs from these books and from various standards bodies. These books have been an excellent reference and useful design guide for handling business related data. Open For Business uses a variation on the models in the book, but most concepts from the book are actively used, enough so that it is very worth it to buy these books.
Accounting and Supply Chain
Accounting Best Practices This book is one of many accounting and financial management books by Steven M. Bragg. It covers general processes and methods for financial and to some extent general enterprise resource management. It is understandable for those who are not accountants, yet still of incredible value to those who are. These are some of the best practices approaches that we have already or plan to incorporate into the OFBiz applications.
Supply Chain Strategy This book is to Supply Chain Management what Steven Bragg‘s book is to Accounting. It is a great resource for inventory and warehouse management best practices and includes numerous examples of statistical analysis in addition to various processes and methods.
Reporting, Warehousing & Mining
The Data Warehouse Toolkit, Second Edition This book covers general data warehousing principles, but perhaps even more useful it also includes discussion of warehousing strategies and models for things such as retail sales, inventory, procurement, order management, CRM, accounting, human resources, financial services, utilities, transportation, education, health care, ecommerce, and insurance. In essence there is a lot of useful information here for future expansion of OFBiz.
Data Mining, Second Edition covers general data mining principles with practical demonstrations based on the open source Weka software. These concepts and tools are used for things such as classification, clustering, decision trees, etc. Has brief coverage of text mining, but on that topic
Document Warehousing and Text Mining is much more complete and applicable.
User Interfaces and HTML/CSS
Don‘t Make Me Think! is a great book about designing web sites and web-based user interfaces for ease of use and navigation. Very highly recommended, with solutions to common problems that come up in web site and applications all the time.
The Design of Sites has less general theory and more specific examples of good designs for all sorts of general purposes from information layout to navigation to general and advanced ecommerce.
The Zen of CSS Design is a great book about effective use of CSS for web sites. These patterns help achieve goals such as easily changing L&F with only CSS changes, and minimizing the explicit styling information in HTML, ie using more implicit structure information and special purpose classes or ids. The companion web site has some great examples:
http://www.csszengarden.com/Java & J2EE
Head First Java This book is a good introduction to Java and object oriented programming principles. Recommended for those doing lower level or more technical development or customization of OFBiz, or who wish to have a better general understanding of how the system fits together.
Core J2EE Patterns This book is an excellent introduction to general best practice J2EE design patterns. Many of the concepts used in the OFBiz core framework are explained in this book. It covers the various tiers of a J2EE application included presentation, business logic and persistence. As a side note, the patterns on The ServerSide are an excellent supplement to this material.
Other Stuff
Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing contains good coverage of general issues related to open source licensing for both producers and consumers of the software. Also covers in depth the various families of open source licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache/Artistic, GPL/LGPL/Mozilla, Qt/Artistic/Creative Commons, Proprietary, Sun Community, Microsoft Shared Source).
Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion is a good book about general project and development process enablement and support, with details and examples based on Subversion (including taking advantage of the improvements in Subversion over CVS that make certain processes so much easier).
SQL in a Nutshell, Second Edition Just a good general book about SQL. A general reference based on the SQL2003 standard and covers details of SQL Server, DB2, MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL.
XSL-FO, Making XML Look Good in Print covers general information about the XSL-FO standard from W3C and has extensive example of how to achieve specific effects and such.
