March 14, 2008

openCRX - The Professional Enterprise Class Open Source CRM Solution

openCRX is an open CRM solution that meets the needs of organizations requiring multifunctional, enterprise-wide coordination of sales generation, sales fulfillment, marketing and service activities to customers, partners, suppliers or intermediaries:

Groupware

openCRX features lots of groupware functionality enabling users to manage e-mails and calendars (shared and/or private ones). Calender information is available in a variety of formats including CalDAV, ICS/iCal, and FreeBusy so that users manage their calendars with their preffered calendar client. E-mails are accessible with any IMAP-enabled E-mail client. With the seamlessly integrated XWiki users can easily manage and share documents and other information. openCRX also features an LDAP Server.

Account Management

openCRX's account management provides a true 360° view of customers across contracts, activities, products, and status. Account management enables your employees to build tighter, more profitable relationships by understanding the status of each account.

Product and Price Management

In addition to managing products, prices and price lists in multiple currencies, you can build complex products based on simple products. openCRX supports the whole range of advanced product structuring, e.g. product bundling and design of product offerings based on multiple product bundles. Extremely flexible pricing rules, which you can add/modify at run-time, allow you to implement any desired pricing algorithm.

Sales Pipeline

openCRX allows your team to focus on profitable deals and close them faster by sharing consistent sales information, tracking deal progress, and recording all deal-related interactions. In combination with openCRX's activity management you can customize your own sales processes. The sales pipeline gives marketing professionals the tools to manage prospects and existing customers. You can integrate the openCRX sales pipeline at any stage with your existing ERP application to provide your sales force with relevant real-time data like warehouse information, shipping status, etc.

Advanced Activity Management and Issue Tracking

Coordinate workflow in large projects, track and monitor all project-related incidents and activities, group and structure your activities with activity trackers, stay in control with advanced time-tracking and real-time reports - or simply use openCRX as a very sophisticated bug tracker (» read more). openCRX v1.12 will include a fully fledged CalDAV server.

Tools and Administration

openCRX administrators can customize the openCRX application to fit unique business demands, from adding/removing attributes or changing the screen layout to designing advanced activity processes to enhance the information flow within your organization. Advanced access control allows you to share information or restrict access based on user profile, role or team. Finally, extend openCRX with additional business modules with the openCRX wizards, reports and workflow capabilities.

openCRX Home Page
http://www.opencrx.org/

Download openCRX
http://www.opencrx.org/downloads.htm

January 24, 2008

Apache Cocoon

Apache Cocoon is a Spring-based (since version 2.2) framework built around the concepts of separation of concerns and component-based development.

Cocoon implements these concepts around the notion of component pipelines, each component on the pipeline specializing on a particular operation. This makes it possible to use a Lego(tm)-like approach in building web solutions, hooking together components into pipelines, often without any required programming.

Cocoon used as web framework is "web glue for your web application development needs". It is a glue that keeps concerns separate and allows parallel evolution of all aspects of a web application, improving development pace and reducing the chance of conflicts. In particular it makes it easy to support multiple output formats, offers continuation based web controller implementations and comes with a JSR-168 compatible Portal implementation.

Cocoon blocks

A block is the unit of modularization (in comparison: Eclipse uses the term plugins, OSGi bundles) in Cocoon. Everything that goes beyond what Cocoon provides in its core modules (Spring integration, sitemap and pipeline implementation) is provided as block. Custom Cocoon applications are also developed as blocks. A block can provide the following features:

* general servlet services (any servlet can be managed by the Cocoon servlet-service framework),
* special services that provide pipelines as services,
* component services (Spring beans, Avalon services/components),
* a container for classes and resources.

A block is packaged as a Java archive (jar) following certain conventions concerning the directory structure.

General features

* Apache Cocoon is a Spring-based (since version 2.2) framework built around the concepts of separation of concerns and component-based development, ensuring that people can interact and collaborate on a project without stepping on each other toes.
* Cocoon implements these concepts around the notion of component pipelines, each component on the pipeline specializing in a particular operation (usual pipeline uses a Generator, Transformers and a Serializer). This makes it possible to use a Lego(tm)-like approach in building web solutions, hooking together components into pipelines without requiring programming.
* Advanced Control Flow: continuation-based page flow hides the complexity of request/response processing and is cleanly separated from the view and data components.
* Cocoon is open source software (based on the Apache License 2.0).
* Cocoon does not duplicate efforts but tightly integrates many technologies.
* Cocoon is in use at many live sites and on many company networks.
* Cocoon has a strong community, with many active developers and more than plenty of active committers!
* There is free support from the thousands of people on our mailing lists and commercial support is available from various companies and consultants.
* There are many Cocoon sessions at different conferences:
o Cocoon GetTogether
o ApacheCon
o Austrian Cocoon Day
o WJAX
o JAX

Usage scenarios

As you would expect, all of these scenarios can be combined.

* Dynamic multi-channel web publishing (see below for the possible datasources and output formats)
* Create static content (automatically) by separating data from view
* Offline generation modes with Cocoon's own offline facilities: command-line interface (CLI), ant task, bean. Also with Apache Forrest which utilises Cocoon.
* Dynamic document preparation with Apache Forrest, the 'forrest run' mode. Use many different data input formats, see the transformed result immediately in the browser.
* Advanced web applications with J2EE integration (with separation of your data, the view and the flow logic --> this really means you can change one of the parts without touching another)
* Develop your company portal using the Cocoon Portal framework
* Support multiple clients, layouts and languages (i18n) without code duplication
* Integrate Cocoon with your existing web applications or use it to put a better face on them (page scraping)
* Add full-text search to any datasource that can be converted to XML (see below)
* Use Cocoon as the base for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)
* Use Cocoon as the base for your Content Management System (CMS) (see Apache Lenya, Daisy CMS and Hippo CMS)
* Use Cocoon for producing mobile content (mobile phones, PDAs)
* Datawarehouse reporting across multiple formats (see xReporter)

Apache Cocoon Home Page
http://cocoon.apache.org/

Download Apache Cocoon
http://cocoon.apache.org/mirror.cgi

CRISPY, Communication per Remote Invocation for different kinds of Services via ProxYs.

CRISPY = Communication per Remote Invocation for different kinds of Services via ProxYs.

The intention for this project is a very simple API to call different kinds of services (provider/technology). Crispy's aims is to provide a single point of entry for remote invocation for a wide number of transports: eg. RMI, EJB, JAX-RPC or XML-RPC. It works by using properties to configure a service manager, which is then used to invoke the remote API. Crispy is a simple Java codebase with an API that sits between your client code and the services your code must access. It provides a layer of abstraction to decouple client code from access to a service, as well as its location and underlying implementation. The special on this idea is, that these calls are simple Java object calls (remote or local calls are transparent).

From Crispy supported transport provider are:

* Web-Service (JAX-RPC, for example Axis),
* XML-RPC (for example Apache XML-RPC),
* Burlap and Hessian (Caucho),
* RMI,
* EJB (with JNDI lookup),
* JBoss Remoting,
* REST (REpresentational State Transfer), a Crispy implementation with commons httpclient and
* Http invoker (http call with serializable Java objects), a Crispy implementation with commons httpclient
* CORBA (experimental)

CRISPY Home Page
http://crispy.sourceforge.net/

Download CRISPY
http://crispy.sourceforge.net/download.html

Apache Axis

Apache Axis is an implementation of the SOAP ("Simple Object Access Protocol") submission to W3C.

From the draft W3C specification:

SOAP is a lightweight protocol for exchanging structured information in a decentralized, distributed environment. It is an XML based protocol that consists of three parts: an envelope that defines a framework for describing what is in a message and how to process it, a set of encoding rules for expressing instances of application-defined datatypes, and a convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses.

This project is a follow-on to the Apache SOAP project.

Apache Axis Home Page
http://ws.apache.org/axis/

Download Apache Axis
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/webservices/axis/trunk/

args4j

args4j is a small Java class library that makes it easy to parse command line options/arguments in your CUI application.

* It makes the command line parsing very easy by using annotations.
* You can generate the usage screen very easily.
* You can generate HTML/XML that lists all options for your documentation.
* Fully supports localization.
* It is designed to parse javac like options (as opposed to GNU-style where ls -lR is considered to have two options l and R.)
* It is licensed under the MIT license.

args4j Home Page
https://args4j.dev.java.net/

Download args4j
https://args4j.dev.java.net/servlets/ProjectDocumentList?folderID=3330&expandFolder=3330&folderID=0

Natural CLI

Natural CLI is a Java library providing to developers command line interfaces with human readable sentences.

It means, your software can understand easily command lines like the following:

Main Features:

* Java implementation.
* Easy to code. Please, visit the examples page and the Javadocs.
* Type checking for parameters and user defined types.
* Optional parameters and tokens.
* Build-id help command and others.
* Full tested with JUnit.
* Can be compatible with Apache Commons CLI.

Natural CLI Home Page

http://naturalcli.sourceforge.net/

Download Natural CLI
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=208949

Apache Commons CLI library

The Apache Commons CLI library provides an API for processing command line interfaces.

Commons CLI 1.0 was formed from the merger of ideas and code from three different libraries - Werken, Avalon and Optz. In dealing with the bugs and the feature requests a freshly designed and not backwards compatible CLI 2.0 was created, but never finished or released. Since then a CLI 1.1 bugfix release has been made.

There are currently no plans to continue the 1.x line beyond bugfixes. The 2.x design is generally preferred and is in use, however there is no current activity to make a 2.0 release. To this end, the 1.1 release is recommended to most users while the 2.x line is recommended for anyone interested in helping to get this better API released.

Apache Commons CLI library Home Page
http://commons.apache.org/

Download Apache Commons CLI library
http://commons.apache.org/downloads/download_cli.cgi

Pentaho Reporting (JFreeReport)

Pentaho Reporting is a collection of open source projects primarily focused on the creation, generation and distribution of rich and sophisticated report content from all sources of information.

* Full on-screen print preview;
* Data obtained via Swings TableModel interface (making it easy to print data directly from your application);
* XML-based report definitions;
* Output to the screen, printer or various export formats:
o PDF
o HTML
o CSV
o Excel
o Plain text (including special support for ESC/P and IBM compatible printers)
* Support for servlets (uses the JFreeReport extensions)
* Complete source code included (subject to the GNU LGPL);
* Extensive source code documentation
* Minimal footprint and dependencies
* Unmatched flexibility through a heavily modularized architecture


The Pentaho Report Designer simplifies and streamlines the report creation process, making it easy for report authors to quickly create sophisticated, visually rich reports based upon JFreeReports. It was originally developed by gridvision engineering GmbH and is now developed by Pentaho Corporation provided under the terms of the Mozilla Public License, Version 1.1, or any later version. Features include

* Drag & Drop Report Layout. No need to learn the JFreeReport XML syntax.
* Wizard allows to select data source and create a simple query in an easy to interface.
* View to see the full report structure.
* Powerful, allow access all the JFreeReport functions.
* Live preview of the final Report.
* Create Reports directly on your workstation without the need for a server.
* Live Report Validation always know what's wrong and why, without interrupting your workflow
* Merge Reports: Save common headers and footers as report and import them as you like
* Morph Element field types. Change a text field into a message field with one click.
* Edit multiple elements at once: Change attributes like color and alignment of multiple elements at once.

Pentaho Reporting Home Page
http://reporting.pentaho.org/

Download Pentaho Reporting
http://www.pentaho.com/download/ga.php