Business Applications

So,  a project I have been mulling on for years is finally beginning to come to fruition.  Called the re.rooting collaborative, it is an initiative to combine the efforts of alternative economy practicioners, stakeholders and motivated software developers to begin a concerted, community effort to imagine, develop and extend open source software to enable everything from various types of co-ops, buying clubs, local food systems to microlending and community currencies.

Yes, there are already many projects underway.  We will be featuring these projects and others, and offer an aggregated space for raising capital to develop specific functionality, and a space for combining ideas and documenting needs to better accomodate the wide array of businesses, organizations and efforts underway.

What was the impetus?

Hot on the heels of two events that I presented at, the Entrepreneurs for Sustainability Startup-Showcase, where I described this project, as well as the Ohio Employee Ownership Center Conference where I presented on our worker collective model for Flywheel Tech Collective, we found that there is substantial interest on the side of entrepreneurs, practitioners and stakeholding organziations in low-cost, appropriate open source solutions to meet the needs of more non-conventional business models.

We have already been working with our colleagues at the Future Forward Institute to begin imagining new frameworks and models, and to gather information about various existing solutions and how they could be adapted to meet the needs of these kinds of entities.  We are already working with various business entities where we are adapting these solutions to their needs as co-ops or social enterprises, but our interest is growing in creating a community-driven platform from which to mobilize resources, input and stakeholders as new projects to begin to meet emerging or existing needs.

Where is it at now?

So I happened across a tweet via Fabien Pinckaers ( #fpopenerp ) the other day, dropping a hint about a new (and of course modular & very extensible) web-based touchscreen POS system being developed by the core team.  The only glimpse I had of this web client was via the two urls he mentioned, pointing to a wonderful, snazzy touchscreen GUI.  It looked like this:

So, needless to say, I was enticed.  There are numerous ways to interface OpenERP-server with other touchscreen POS systems, such as Adiempere's POS, OpenBravo, and others.  Data would be moved around via a TerminaTOOR/Kettle kind of bulk data synchronization scheme.   The pos.module,  out of the box, has all the functionality - but even in the snazzy new web interface lacked the true interaction design of a touchscreen POS system - large buttons, immediate information and functionality.  an on-screen 10-key numerical pad, etc. I will give the alternative, KDE-based desktop client Koo some creds for making a good crack at this a while back, and really kind of squeezing the most possible out of the de-facto inline tree view interface.

But really, this is one of OpenERP's greatest weakpoints - the Point of Sale system - until now!  It's about time that OpenERP's core team start taking on a BHAG like this.  I'm sure it has quite a ways to go, but I would love to  help make this happen - and as soon as possible, as we have clients who need this now!

Finding the Project on Launchpad

I knew the project had to be somewhere on launchpad - but this turned out to be a tricky venture.  In retrospect, I probably could have taken a better approach and just meticulously plowed through the openerp codebase on launchpad... but I didn't even know who was developing it at the time - had only just seen glimpses!

But just tonight, I had a lucky break and found the OpenERP eventbrite schedule for the Community & Partners Days (wish I could have been there!) and there discovered a pad from a disucssion on the new web toucschreen POS - http://pad.openerp.com/touchscreen-pos

Right at the beginning of the etherpad document, I see the magical branch name:

 lp:~openerp-dev/openobject-client-web/trunk-proto61-pos

So, if you are interested in branching and playing around, just install it like you would the web client - and experience the magic!  Also, that etherpad will come into play further on in this post, so keep it open!

OpenERP web pos using.... PHP & JSON?!

Yes - gasp - thats right!  From what I can tell it seems that this new web addon is using PHP to talk to openerp-server via JSON-RPC .  This is an unexpected, but very keen move by the development team.  They are using a jquery project - Mottie Keyboard for the on-screen keyboard, as well as jquery 1.4.4 and jquery-ui 1.8.10 on the backend. That little toolset right there is going to prove for loads of fun in building a really engaging user experience.  It even seems that they are using a project called Dhtmlx Grid for a highly enabled in-line grid editing experience.

Then we have one of the workhorses behind it all, main.py  (the controller for this, the openerp-web addon module called point_of_sale) that is handling the json-rpc requests and iterfacing with openerp-server.

Lastly, another file of note is the static/openerp/js/pos.js file that is handling a lot of the form validation, inline editing and many many of the other UI and direct functionality elements of this new system.  The work that went into this is quite impressive, and will likely go a long way in helping OpenERP to offer not only an amazing POS system, but quite possibly one of the best open source POS systems available (considering the powerful backend).