| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software |
| Founded | 2001 |
| Headquarters | Norfolk, Virginia, USA |
| Products | ERP |
| Website | www.xtuple.com |
xTuple is an Enterprise Software company, author of three products branded under the name xTuple ERP. The PostBooks Edition of xTuple ERP is a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) application, available for download from SourceForge on the PostBooks project page. The Standard and Manufacturing 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 Standard and Manufacturing Editions have more functionality for larger companies and those companies needing more manufacturing capabilities.
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xTuple began its life as OpenMFG developing and building its flagship product of the same name beginning in the year 2000. OpenMFG was a commercially licensed ERP system targeted toward small to midsize manufacturers. 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. Unlike open source software, however, the code was not made publicly available.
The company spent several years building its product, and settled into a release cycle of roughly one major release every twelve months. The version 2.0 of OpenMFG (released in 2006) added Master Production Schedule, multi-currency, and CRM, filling the most obvious gaps in its claim on true mid-tier ERP functionality.
In 2007, the product received a 5 star rating from the Channel Web Network,[1] specifically for integrating Customer relationship management (CRM) functionality into its generally manufacturing oriented ERP package, and also when it became a finalist in the eWEEK Excellence awards.[2] The company further gained attention in July 2007 when it simultaneously announced the change of their corporate name from OpenMFG to xTuple and the launch of the PostBooks open source project at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon. [3] The project was originally to be released under the "xTuple License," a derivative of the Mozilla Public License, but xTuple was quickly criticized for introducing "yet another" open source license variant.[4] However, at that very same conference SocialText announced the release of the new Open Source Initiative approved Common Public Attribution License (CPAL). Two days later xTuple switched PostBooks to CPAL and became the second company to adopt this license[5] which is the license in use today.
More recently xTuple has extended its business model to include database services which it calls XTN[6] which include remote backup, upgrade and optimization of user hosted PostgreSQL databases.
The two tier design of the xTuple solutions intentionally places the burden of transaction processing on the server - specifically the database server. All the business logic resides in the procedural language of the open source database PostgreSQL, allowing for a variety of client interfaces and scalability unbound by client-side limitations. The primary interface today is a graphical user interface (GUI) client that operates on Windows, Linux/Unix, and Macintosh platforms.
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.
The xTuple applications make heavy use of Postgres' embedded procedural language, called PL/pgSQL. Whenever any kind of transaction is taking place in the system - a financial account being credited or debited, a piece of inventory being moved, or an order being taken - that is happening in a Postgres stored procedure, trigger, or function. This approach makes it relatively easy for other client software besides the xTuple ERP graphical client to access business functionality, typically through well-defined APIs built with database views.