Opentaps FAQ

 

1. How robust and scalable is opentaps?

- Opentaps is very robust and scalable. It is a massive ERP framework and caters to a lot of OOTB business functions. It is a perfect fit for Enterprise Ecommerce, Warehouse Management and CRM/SFA.

 

2. What are the top 1 or 2 design and deployment decisions to ensure this?

- Use OFBiz caching as much as possible. Use Apache full-page caching of public facing pages. Load balance if required. Remove JSessionId from URLs. Make all URLs SEO friendly. Have a well defined SEO strategy. Sitemap should be in place. Use CDN.

 

3. What do rough specs of hardware configurations look like?

- It depends on traffic and load. On an average, our servers are clusters of 4-8GB quad cores. We have also deployed on Amazon EC2 large instances.

 

4.  What was the worst support problem you experience in the field with opentaps?

- The vastness of Opentaps can be overwhelming. There is a huge learning curve and it takes around 1-2 years to get a good handle of all functionalities and core framework codebase.

 

5. What was the maintenance experience in general like?

- Initial post-launch maintenance involves bug fixes and system tuning based on customer requirements. After the project stabilizes, maintenance only involves addition of new features, products, categories, offerings etc.

 

6.  How are bugfixes from opentaps handled?

- We never keep our production systems in sync with the Opentaps trunk or releases. That has never worked in the past and is very tedious. We usually apply critical patches to the codebase on case basis.

 

7. What is the most difficult part of customizing opentaps or building on top of it?

- Handling Dropships, Shipping Estimates, Payment Processing and Shopping Cart

 

8. What is the most important qualification for a developer to work with opentaps?

- Good problem solving and reverse-engineering ability, 2-3+ years JEE experience preferably in Struts, Spring, Hibernate.

 

9. What are some of the custom security/privacy features needs to be implemented to handle e-commerce?

-  You need to implement CrossSiteScripting (for PCI) and SEO Filters. You also need to implement a custom service to scrub all credit card numbers for completed orders. Currently, credit card number are stored in the opentaps database though SHA encryption, but we make sure all of them are scrubbed for completed orders.

 

10. Did you find its architecture overly complex as to hamper customization and performance? 

-  Architecture is very flexible to easily handle customization and does not affect performance.

 

11. What are some necessary common integrations with other systems (payment etc.) with opentaps?

- Payflow, UPS (both integrations are built-in)