Initial version of Mifos X was not designed to be database agnostic. Goal of this project is to make it so, and test this out in practice by running it locally on Oracle, make sure our test suite runs against Oracle as well as mysql, and well documenting how this can be set up by end-user clients, if they wish to go for this deployment.

To make this possible, all business logic has to be concentrated in the middle tier with the database being as dumb as possible. This means the platform does not rely on any database specific stored procedures or on the database to generate unique keys.

And also application heavily use prepared statements (Spring jdbctemplate) for retrieving data and need to make sure all these queries use full JOIN syntax, and bracket the JOINs so that each join is between a single table and bracketed expression.

MFI with large client base can use the application with Oracle or any other commercial databases.

Mifos has abstraction from underlying database using:

• Hibernate as ORM (must have good experience with Hibernate)
• Liquibase as Database refactoring tool
• DbUnit as test dataset maintenance

Primary objective of this project is to build a standalone installer for MifosX platform. Standalone installer is a great way to evaluate and explore MifosX platform quickly. We want:

• Possibility of Mifos self-contained demo package
• Simple / easy launch of integration/acceptance testing, without requiring an external DB
• Development without manual MySQL installation

Standalone installer will consist of an embeded apache server and a DB. It should also ship with the latest mifosx build war file which should automatically deployed
on to the embedded server at the installation time.

1. Develop the installer as an executable jar format so that it will support many platforms with JRE.
2. Provides a simplified installation option with an embedded data base and a server.
3. Develop GUI and command line base installation modes.

GUI MODE OPTIONS
================

Tomcat Port This is the port at which to run tomcat.
MySQL Port This is the port at which to run mysql
File > Quit This menu item stops tomcat and mysql and then closes the application.
File > Launch Browser This menu item opens the MifosX login page for the current web application context.
File > Clear Output This clears the output log in a user interface text area. But does not clear the log file which will written on the file system.
Start This button runs tomcat, which will automatically start the mysql database engine if it was not already running. For the embedded mysql, the first connection automatically starts the mysql engine.
Stop This button stops tomcat and then also stops the mysql database engine, without closing the application.

COMMAND LINE OPTIONS
====================

-mysqlport Use to override the mysql port in the runtime properties file.
-tomcatport Use to override the tomcat port in the runtime properties file.
-start Use to start the server.
-stop Use to stop the server.
-browser Use to launch a new browser instance.

This sub-project would port / apply our MIFOS-5157 Installer-free simple launcher from classic Mifos to Mifos X, and then look at how to extend such a package to run without any existing external database as planned in MIFOS-4926 (which MIFOS-5157 doesn't cover). The first thought that comes to mind is to achieve this with a pure-Java in-memory database such as H2 or Derby. However, in order to avoid maintaining & supporting 2 different databases for Mifos, we'd like to base this on https://github.com/vorburger/MariaDB4j. While we are at it, we should also replace the classic GPL mysql driver by the LGPL MariaDB Client Library.

For many microfinance institutions who lack technical skills, installing Mifos X is a burden that prevents them from using this software to more efficiently serve the poor. Often they get lost in the installation process when having to separately install java, their web server, MySQL, and then deploy Mifos. A self-contained package acting as a simple one-step installer for Mifos would help make the software more accessible to more organizations and allow for MFI to more easily test the software and see the immense value it provides.

https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/docs/OpenMRS+Standalone
https://github.com/openmrs/openmrs-standalone
https://github.com/openmrs/openmrs-standalone/tree/master/src/main/config

See Linux Installers wiki page

Mifos X today is typically used on Tomcat (with Jetty known to work). For a certain class of users, testing it on "Enterprise Stack" application servers (meaning IBM WebSphere and Oracle WebLogic) is desirable - this project would properly test Mifos X on these configurations, make any adaptations to the code which may be required, and produce easy to follow documentation or even small tools helping future users how to go about this.

This project could be combined with and taken up by the same candidate as the Enterprise database project.

Java, Application Server configuration, WAS classloading crap tricks, documentation writing.

Use Cargo, Arquillian etc. for automated testing against WAS & WLS containers?

Vendor pages