alt Hacker NewsI am currently building this vision with AliaJS (platform engineering tool), where the solid base for the platform will be ERPNext, I agree with the author, we can be flexible on solid bases, it just needs to be more open (not SAP) so we can iterate faster.
ERPNext (Frappe) is absolutely brilliant. My only complaint was that it is in Python and is a bit heavy weight (setup etc) for quick prototyping.
They call a table definition - that defines a table at both the SQL level, and at the domain level - a DocType (see: https://docs.frappe.io/framework/user/en/basics/doctypes). When you declare a DocType you immediately get a working table, foreign keys transformed into combo boxes for lookups, forms, and a whole set of conveniences that are common to ERP-like applications.
Before seeing ERPNext I would've thought that such a declarative approach would fail to satisfy the critical remaining 20% of most requirements, but they've built around it in a way that has enabled them to ship a complex ERP system that thousands of businesses of different shapes use. I think it is one of those gems that are not in popular conscience among software engineers, compared to regular frameworks (but very much so in business-ERP adjacent circles), and is worth learning from.