--- layout: post status: PUBLISHED published: true title: 'Apache OFBiz News - April 2019 ' id: 387d1bf2-ef7d-4d03-890e-a455ff06244e date: '2019-05-09 06:23:04 -0400' categories: ofbiz tags: [] permalink: ofbiz/entry/apache-ofbiz-news-april-2019 ---

Apache OFBiz News April 2019

Welcome to our regular monthly round-up of OFBiz news. This month we have more news about OFBiz build support with Java Open JDK & Java 8, and a new Job prioritisation feature along with our usual list of features and improvements.

Support with Java Open JDK and Java 8

In February blog we have informed about community's decision to keep release 17.12 (unreleased) on Java 8, and 18.12 (unreleased) & trunk be switched to Java 11 on OpenJDK. As per the recent discussion, the community has decided that 18.12 and trunk be kept on Java 8 only. Adopt Open JDK 8 LTS is supported at least until September 2023. The idea is to provide minimal Java version support. It will give users enough time to plan, test and migrate to newer Java version. Though the community will continue to make codebase forward compatible.

Please refer to Mail thread.

Thanks, Jacques, Scott, Michael, Taher, Mathieu, Pierre, Jim and to everyone who gave their valuable inputs.  

Job prioritization

Job prioritization allows specifying a priority for a job thus JobPoller queue them accordingly. It will help important jobs to be prioritized over normal jobs, and low priority jobs can be left until last. The feature is committed to trunk thus it will be available in future releases (after unreleased 18.12).

Please refer to OFBIZ-10865, and Mail thread to know more about its implementation.

Thank you so much, Scott Gray, for initiating and putting efforts in this direction, and to everyone who contributed to this effort

Using code128 instead of code39 for barcode generation

Currently, OFBiz uses code39 to generate barcodes but there are some limitations associated with it. It is only able to encrypt letters from A to Z, digits from 0 to 9 and an additional set of special characters – “. $ % + – / *”. To enhance the support for more characters in the barcode community decided on using code128 instead of code39.
Some of the advantages of using code128:

  1. It supports all the 128 ASCII symbols.
  2. It is more concise and space-efficient.
  3. It provides its users with higher degree of data security.

Please refer to OFBIZ-10896 and Mail thread.

Thanks, Pawan Verma for initiating the discussion and to everyone who participated by providing their valuable inputs.

Marital status to be managed with Enumeration entity

Currently, marital status is managed as an indicator (Y/N) in Person entity. The community has decided to enhance it with support of more broader classifications namely Married, Widowed, Separated, Divorced and Single by making it derived from Enumeration entity.

Please refer to OFBIZ-10921 and Mail thread.

Thanks, Suraj Khurana for initiating the discussion and to everyone who participated by providing their valuable inputs.

OFBiz Statistics

Apache Kibble tracks some Apache OFBiz community statistics on its demo instance, so we have highlighted a few of our stats for the last month:

New features and improvements

Functional enhancements and improvements as well as updates of third party libraries and source code refactoring:

Framework

Plugins

Bugfixes

Functional and technical bugfixes:

Framework

Plugins

Documentation

Framework