Is a free to use and extensible Warehouse Management System (WMS) with a Material Flow Control (MFC) system for automatic and manual
warehouses.
Find further documentation in the Wiki
This repository
This is the root repository of the OpenWMS.org project. The business services are developed in their own repositories, listed in the
table below. This repository contains the project-level documentation and one Maven module, the org.openwms.core.util library with
utility classes, exception types and common event types that are shared by all other OpenWMS.org services.
Build
Building requires JDK 25 and uses the Maven wrapper:
./mvnw clean verify -DsurefireArgs=-Dspring.profiles.active=ASYNCHRONOUS,TEST
The remote parent POM org.openwms:org.openwms.parent manages all plugin and dependency versions. Snapshot artifacts are deployed to
the Sonatype Central snapshot repository on every push to master.
Architecture
Instead of applying a technical layered architecture (like with previous technologies), the current architecture focuses on
business components. Business functions with a high cohesion are kept together as small deployable software components. Each
component has its own development lifecycle with its own roadmap of the API evolution and a separate data store. The following sketch shows
all currently existing components of the OpenWMS.org system together with all potential surrounding systems.
Beside the user interface, several other systems interact with the OpenWMS.org system. ERP systems on top are sending high-level tasks
to OpenWMS.org, e.g. a customer orders with order lines that refer to products managed by the Inventory Service.
OpenWMS.org fulfills these tasks by orchestrating the underlying subsystems. The communication between OpenWMS.org and an ERP system might
be in both directions, OpenWMS.org although sends status messages back to the ERP or might request product catalog updates, depending on the
project needs. On the bottom of the above graphic the system if connected to devices that are close to actors and sensors in automatic
warehouses. Those devices are almost limited in hardware resources and protocol stacks. Typical PLC
(Programmable Logic Controllers) are used to interact with field sensors and to control actors. OpenWMS.org is an open source software and
therefore promotes the usage of open source hardware components over commercial PLC products. The first choice of supported devices
are boards, like Raspberry Pi or industrial Revolution Pi, with an open
microcontroller architecture. But nevertheless also closed proprietary systems are supported as well. All this kind of subsystems have one
thing in common: They are close to the hardware and expect response times in the range of milliseconds to control motors and switch gates
very quickly. They have the power to bring down a serving component down just by repeating requests all the time. Typical web application
clients are different in that the infrastructure takes care of DoS attacks, and the application server pools incoming traffic.
Read more about each components architecture and design on the components corresponding GitHub page.
Technologies
The current technology baseline is Java 25 and Spring Boot 4.1. In addition to a bunch of Spring Framework subprojects, OpenWMS.org
supports popular BPMN workflow engines like Activiti,
Flowable and Camunda to take routing decisions on the transport layer.
RDBMS access is most often realised with the Jakarta Persistence API. Some
components might also use NoSQL databases, like MongoDB. RabbitMQ in combination with the Spring Integration project
is used as an event broker for asynchronous event and command propagation. Currently, all microservices are realised as Spring Boot
applications designed to run on any modern PaaS cloud platforms, like the Azure Kubernetes Service, AWS EKS or Redhat OpenShift.
Microservices
Due to OpenWMS.org is built on a modern distributed microservice architecture that follows the Twelve-Factor
methodology, all functional business components are managed within their own SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) and own source code
repositories.
Current state of development
Most components are under active development. In 2016 the whole product has been migrated from the technical structured OSGi architecture
towards a business oriented architecture with Spring Boot microservices and Netflix OSS components. Documentation of previously released
versions does still exist on SourceForge.net and Atlassian Confluence.
All current documentation is maintained in OpenWMS Cloud Wiki.
Previous Architectures
The project started in 2005 with an J2EE server approach based on EJB2.1 with XDoclets, Hibernate and JavaServer Faces (JSF). In more than
15 years we’ve seen a bunch of technologies addressing all the same problems.
A PoC has been implemented with EJB2.1, but the project actually started with EJB3.0. Since around 2007 OpenWMS.org is based on the Spring
Framework and this is still fine, and the right choice. Spring in combination with OSGi seemed to be the perfect match to build a modular
and extensible base project. Unfortunately Spring stopped their efforts on OSGi, in particular on Spring dmServer and Spring Dynamic Modules
. In a transition step to the current microservice architecture, we put all the OSGi bundles into a fat JavaEE WAR deployment unit to run
the application on a servlet container like Apache Tomcat. After that we redesigned all services and business functions and applied a
microservice architecture. The standalone WAR deployment is not supported anymore because it was not demanded by the community. Only the
microservice architecture is supported right now.
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