Book review on "ADempiere 3.6 Cookbook" part 1

The subtitle promises more than 100 recipes for extending and customizing ADempiere beyond its standard capbilities.

Chapter 1 describes how to set up your own development environment. This is really necessary for most of the recipes which truly go beyond customizing work via the user interface. In addition you get some hints on how to configure different server setups.

Chapter 2 and 3 implement new functionality for "minutes of meeting" in a mini project mainly using only the customization capability you get with ADempiere itself. It covers creation of new tables and a related window with multiple tabs and how to put it into the menu. You learn how to use data types, references to other tables and how to configure zoom and access rights.

Chapter 3 describes how to drive the display logic and get a field into search. Then comes the first step of extension work by programming in Java. The case study gets some business logic on field and record level and by generating a standalone process.

All recipes are clearly structured with some introducing text and a step by step guide of what to do. If applicable the necessary preparation of the environment is described and there is an additional explanation of what has been achieved by the steps. In some places the author points to the ADempiere wiki or to Wikiversity for helpful background or training material. The sourcecode for the examples can be downloaded via the page related to this book at the Packt website.

Starting with chapter 4 the basics are left behind. It elaborates on how to connect from other systems to ADempiere using model oriented web services. The extension provided by 3E is installed and configured to give ADempiere the necessary capabilities. Using the simple soupUI client all interactions for reading and updating data up to running an ADempiere process are demonstrated.

To be continued.