ERP application development frameworks: Case study and evaluation

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software brings many benefits to an organization, but commercial software is expensive. Smaller organizations may prefer free and open source solutions but are faced with an enormous array of options from different vendors. One of the most difficult decisions to make is whether to develop software from scratch or to adopt a free and open source ERP framework. To answer this question, we evaluate one of the most popular enterprise software development frameworks, JBoss Seam, and one of the most popular open source frameworks for ERP development, Apache Open for Business. Using a simple real-world application integration problem involving an asset management system and an accounting system as a case study, we compare the frameworks along a number of dimensions. We find that the ERP framework, OFBiz, is the better choice for simple ERP development problems typically encountered in smaller enterprises.