ERP Software Marketplace with P2 sites

Finally yesterday on a marvelous date of 12.12.12, I pulled off what I will call the greatest trick out of the hat of Open Source Software for the ERP marketplace. We can now publish and distribute 3rd party ERP features or plugin modules in a decoupled manner via the use of Eclipse P2 or Provisioning Platform.

With your iDempiere installed, you can just run a short script in your idempiere-server to pick up a sample plugin ready to run on the fly here:

java -Dosgi.noShutdown=false -Dosgi.compatibility.bootdelegation=true -Dosgi.install.area=director -jar plugins/org.eclipse.osgi_3.7.*.jar -application org.eclipse.equinox.p2.director -consoleLog -profile DefaultProfile -profileProperties org.eclipse.update.install.features=true -repository http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/red1/p2/POSIntegration/ -i POS-Integration.feature.group

And upon running the app, a new module in total functioning order magically appears.

Total functioning order means the DB model changes are applied via 2Pack, and the processes usable via OSGi extensions declared within the plugin. Testing it proved their working as well as the dependent jars of the core project and ActiveMQ tooling.

For more details, visit my forum posting or read the complete tutorial to develop such a plugin from start to end.

(Epilogue) I made a movie on how this can work in a 'hot running' mode: