The OpenLMIS Community is pleased to announce the 3.0 release of OpenLMIS!
<insert exciting text> re-architecture effort for OpenLMIS,, Requisitions, based on an all-new micro-service architecture. This release is the first to utilize the new architecture and is a bold step in the direction of “shared investment, shared benefit” that is the rallying cry of the OpenLMIS Community. 3.0 Beta is a proof of concept for this architecture and is not a feature-complete release. It does not contain every feature that the eventual 3.0 OpenLMIS stable release will. Further features will be added to the system as we work toward the full 3.0 release scheduled for the end of February, 2017. Please reference the Living Product Roadmap for the high-level estimated release schedule through version 3.3.
Background
Early contributions to OpenLMIS by PATH, USAID, Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the UN Commission on Life-Saving Commodities, JSI, ThoughtWorks and others first helped shape the product and define its original code base (v.0.9) for deployments in Tanzania and Zambia in late 2013 under the name “eLMIS.” In 2015, eLMIS was also deployed in Cote D’Ivoire, and OpenLMIS software development continued with the v1.0 release, which was deployed by VillageReach to manage vaccine distribution in Mozambique and Benin.
As new installations of OpenLMIS were developed and deployed, a key challenge was the inability to easily extend the code base, which resulted in a “code fork” between the early implementations and the later v1.0 implementations. In an effort to address the fork the community agreed to begin working toward a common master branch, and at the September 2015 all-community meeting, the community also agreed that a single, “core” code line was required. This effort to re-work the OpenLMIS code is referred to as the "Re-Architecture" of OpenLMIS.
VillageReach and partners have worked to make the re-architecture process as transparent as possible through clear documentation available on the OpenLMIS Wiki. The OpenLMIS Re-Architecture Acceleration Brief outlines the plan and approach for this effort, the high level architecture is captured at Architecture Overview (v3), and the Re-Architecture Concept Note provides a detailed, clear explanation of the re-architecture plan and approaches.
OpenLMIS is open source, and all source code for this 3.0 release is available on GitHub for collaboration: https://github.com/OpenLMIS/openlmis-blue. That repository contains the reference distribution, and each service lives in its own GitHub repository as well.
Key Objectives
Objectives:
- Improve visability
- Extensibility
- Architectural goals and technical improvements
- Sustain the majority of 2.0 OpenLMIS feature set
importance of staying up-to-date with latest version (for shared value)
- check in/status snapshot on BMGF re-architecture goals; be honest about what's done and left to do
Key messages:
- technical documentation is coming
- no examples of extension due to prioritization (link to PC decision)
- semantic versioning (pull from Brandon's presentation)
- New product/commodity model
Feature list can be taken from https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1oetvqa6wqyBsUmCbRYaBqdmpOeH4fOOoCYGKN6SiEpo/edit?usp=sharing
New features
- Column header definitions
- Offline
API Documentation