Design

The design choices of Hexya.

This document explains the design choices of Hexya, including the reason why we decided to write Hexya in the first place.

1. Introduction

We used Odoo (http://www.odoo.com) for a few years to fulfil our customers need of business applications. We are great fans of Odoo and managed to create applications for very different businesses, from a 2 people service company to a 500 industrial company.

However, if Odoo is perfectly fitted for small and medium businesses it does not scale well for bigger companies. When we say this, we don’t mean that you can’t have thousands of users on odoo servers, Odoo’s SaaS platform proves the contrary. We say that Odoo does not scale for bigger companies because these companies need more business logic and calculations (such as schedulers, reporting, etc.) and on much larger sets of data. With a 500 people company, we feel we have reached the maximum of calculation power that Odoo could deliver.

So we decided to write Hexya to address this issue, with the following in mind:

  • We want to keep the best from Odoo

  • We want speed for the complex business logic calculation of medium and intermediate businesses.

2. Odoo features

If we want to keep the best from Odoo, we need to define what are, in our opinion, the great features of this software.

2.1. Modular design

We believe that the success of Odoo among its partners and the opensource community is mainly due to its full modular architecture. From the user point of view, this is interesting since it allows to enable/disable features just by installing or uninstalling modules.

But it is, in our opinion, really from the developer point of view that this makes a difference. Indeed, the theory of opensource is that you can modify a software to fit your need. This is great, but doing so you actually create a fork and do not benefit automatically from upstream updates. So in general very few people actually do it. The genius of Odoo’s modular architecture is that you don’t need to make a fork to make a modification to the application: you just have to create a module, and this module can modify any element of the main application (models, views, controllers, client, …) without touching a single line of the original code.

This is definitely something we want to have in Hexya: one should be able to customize Hexya by creating a module without changing Hexya code.

2.2. Large business code base

Over the years, Odoo’s business code (i.e. business logic in add-ons) has grown so much that it can handle business situations from sales to human resources through mrp and event management. This large number of business applications and associated code is also part of the success of Odoo.

This code base is so developed that it would take years rewriting it from scratch. Although Hexya will not be written in python and its internals will be completely different from that of Odoo, Hexya will keep Odoo’s business data model so that modules can be easily ported from Odoo to Hexya.

3. Design choices

This section highlights design choices for Hexya that are different from that of Odoo. They are all made in order to achieve a good speed in business logic calculation.

3.1. Go instead of Python

High calculation speed means a compiled language. Of course there are several workarounds to speed up interpreted languages, but we’re better of with the right tool at the beginning rather than trying to make fixes all the time.

Hexya will be written in GO which is a compiled language known for its fast compilation and execution, that is easy to learn and has some reflection capacities.

3.2. Static configuration

One of Odoo’s feature is that all the configuration of the software is dynamic and held in the database, such as installed modules, view definitions, etc. This is particularly interesting for Odoo in a SaaS environment where several customers use the same Odoo instance and each have its own database.

The drawback of this feature is that the database is constantly queried to get data that hardly change over time. Due to its modular architecture, Odoo also needs to recompute the elements (such as views) at each request by adding data from all the modules that impact this element before sending it to the client. Here again, the data is the same at each request and the calculation gives the same result each time.

Hexya configuration data will be computed at compile time. Only business configuration will be dynamic and stored into the database. This means that a recompilation will be necessary each time an element (view, model, controller) will be modified, but with go’s quick compilation this will not be a big issue.

This choice has several implications that should not be an issue for the target businesses:

  • Installed modules will be determined at compile time, there is no one click install.

  • A running Hexya instance will have all its database with the same configuration, so SaaS Hexya will not be possible as it is in Odoo. Different configurations will mean different instances.

3.3. Developer friendly for high code quality

We believe that ERP systems are serious and need high code quality. We also believe that high code quality is achieved, among others, by static types, attributes and methods that allow many errors to be lifted at compile time.

Hexya’s business development API will be fully static. This also allows common IDEs to make reliable inspections and auto-completion. Developers won’t have to lookup manually existing fields or methods in a model, they will autocomplete nicely.