TUPLE

INTRODUCTION

• XTuple is an enterprise software company that develops and markets open source software under the brand name XTuple ERP.

• The company was originally formed in 2000 as OpenMFG' and rebranded as xTuple in 2007. The company is privately held.

HISTORY

• xTuple began under the name OpenMFG. Jeffrey Lyon, the original developer of OpenMFG, contacted Ned Lilly, who was employee of Great Bridge, a company of Media Enterprises.Lilly left Great Bridge in April 2001 and cofounded OpenMFG with Jeffrey Lyon in October 2001.

• OpenMFG was a commercially licensed ERP system. The company adopted a "community code" model, meaning that customers who purchase or subscribe to licenses for the product have access to view and modify the source code.

XTuple, the one of the best open source ERP, provides enterprise-class technology products and services at an affordable cost — one of the lowest Total Cost of Ownership of any ERP system on the market.

why “XTUPLE"?

SecuritySeveral layers of security are available with xTuple. A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection may be utilized or also enable an enhanced authentication mechanism that scrambles your users’ passwords.

PRODUCTS

• The PostBooks Edition of xTuple ERP is a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) application, available for download from SourceForge on the Post Books project page.

• Post Books was the Source Forge Project of the Month in March 2013.[7] The Standard, Manufacturing, and Enterprise Editions are commercially licensed Enterprise resource planning solutions.

• All three products are built on the same Open source technology foundation, and share the same code base. The commercial Editions have more functionality for larger companies and those companies needing more manufacturing capabilities

TECHNOLOGY

• xTuple ERP provides multiple interface options including a locally installable GUI client application, a web client, and a web services API for third party application integration.

GUI CLIENT

• The GUI client is written in Qt, a C++ toolkit for application development. It lets application developers target all major operating systems (Windows, Linux/Unix, Mac) with a single application source code.

• Qt provides a platform-independent API to all central platform functionality: GUI, database access, networking, file handling, etc.

• The Qt library encapsulates the different APIs of different operating systems, providing the application programmer with a single, common API for all operating systems. The native C APIs are encapsulated in a set of object-oriented C++ classes.

WEB CLIENT

• The web client is built entirely in JavaScript using the Enyo framework for presentation and Backbone.js for model handling.

• The web client is designed to operate on all modern browsers and all devices, including mobile devices such as iOS, Android and Windows 8. Reporting and Business Intelligence functionality are provided by a Pentaho server.

WEB SERVICES

• The web client application is served by a NodeJS server, which also provides a REST based web services API that can be used for third party integration. The web services API uses Google's Discovery Service model to provide a self documenting interface.

DATABASE

• xTuple uses the PostgreSQL database exclusively for storing and managing data. All three interfaces feed into the same database schemas and are therefore interoperable.

• The GUI client relies heavily on PostgreSQL's native procedural language (PL/pgSQL) functions to process business logic, while the web client and node layers leverage additional capability made possible by the integration of Google's V8 JavaScript engine into the database using an extension known as PLV8.

• xTuple has written an Object-relational mapping system embedded in the database using JavaScript that processes all reads and transaction requests made via the NodeJS server.