Tiawichi Research

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m in the process of evaluating open source enterprise resource management tools (ERP) for use in our sister company (CRM Engineering Services). CRM started out as a consulting engineering firm. A chance meeting at a soccer game with the CEO of an oilfield services company started a manufacturing slant to the engineering.

As the orders increased, the need to better manage the vendors, inventory, AR/AP, and manufacturing processes became acute. Hence the interest in ERP systems. Since we are both tightwads and geeks, we of course hunted down open source tools that could do the job. We do not need much sophistication, but we do need more than what a QuickBooks (our current “ERP”) solution can offer us.

Open Bravo and Compiere are the two FOSS solutions of which I am aware. First OpenBravo.

OpenBravo uses a web interface powered by tomcat. On Linux, the installation is relatively straightforward if you are reasonably aware of the file system structure, the command line interface, and basic Linux system administration. I did not evaluate the Windows installation, although it appears to be well documented.

Since I installed OpenBravo on an Ubuntu box (Edgy Eft), the defaults in the Java installer for the Java, Ant, and PostgreSQL need to be changed. I installed all but OpenBravo from the Ubuntu repositories. One little tweak that is not recommended for production use is the disabling of tomcat security to quickly jump over a Java security policy error that I was too lazy to correctly fix:

 - Deploying web application archive openbravo.war
- validateJarFile(/var/lib/tomcat5.5/webapps/openbravo/WEB-INF/lib/servlet-api.jar) - jar not loaded. See Servlet Spec 2.3, section 9.7.2. Offending class: javax/servlet/Servlet.class
- Error configuring application listener of class org.apache.axis.transport.http.AxisHTTPSessionListener
java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
	at org.apache.commons.discovery.jdk.JDKHooks.<clinit>(JDKHooks.java:75)
	at org.apache.commons.discovery.tools.DiscoverSingleton.find(DiscoverSingleton.java:412)
        .
        . blah, blah, blah
        .
	at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.start(Bootstrap.java:294)
	at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:432)
Caused by: java.security.AccessControlException: access denied (java.lang.RuntimePermission createClassLoader)
	at java.security.AccessControlContext.checkPermission(AccessControlContext.java:264)
	at java.security.AccessController.checkPermission(AccessController.java:427)
	at java.lang.SecurityManager.checkPermission(SecurityManager.java:532)
	at java.lang.SecurityManager.checkCreateClassLoader(SecurityManager.java:594)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.<init>(ClassLoader.java:225)
	at org.apache.commons.discovery.jdk.PsuedoSystemClassLoader.<init>(PsuedoSystemClassLoader.java:73)
	at org.apache.commons.discovery.jdk.JDK12Hooks.findSystemClassLoader(JDK12Hooks.java:215)
	at org.apache.commons.discovery.jdk.JDK12Hooks.<clinit>(JDK12Hooks.java:73)
	... 41 more
- Skipped installing application listeners due to previous error(s)
- Error listenerStart
- Context [/openbravo] startup failed due to previous errors

I made the following expeditious change to /etc/init.d/tomcat5.5:

# Use the Java security manager? (yes/no)
# changed from yes to no
TOMCAT5_SECURITY=no

Time to fire up OpenBravo. I like the interface. A few snapshots:

Next post: Using OpenBravo.