News from the Kuwaiba Open Inventory System

Kuwaiba  is an open source inventory system for telecommunications networks and IT infrastructure. It's been developed since early 2010 and is entirely written in Java. The project was started by a group of independent Colombian developers and now is backed by Neotropic SAS .



Main Features

• Dynamic (this is, it can be changed at runtime) object oriented data model
• Client-server architecture with north bound interfaces based on industry standards (webservices)
• Horizontally scalable
• Power cross-platform  desktop client
• The elements are stored based on a customizable containment hierarchy
• Permits CRUD and graphical query operations, as well as graphical interfaces to design physical connections.
• Support for physical and logical models at different layers of the OSI stack

Screenshots

What's new

• A complete server side re-engineering. From the architectural point of view, we layered the initial design (http://neotropic.co/kuwaiba/wiki/index.php?title=Platform_Architecture) to separate the plain persistence services from the business related stuff. Now the persistence engine can be used for anything outside the context of Kuwaiba, since it's completely business-agnostic. This engine lets you define your own dynamic data model, manipulate it and scale it at will. It's also database agnostic, since it exposes a well-known API that can be implemented using virtually any backend. Our reference implementation uses Neo4J (a graph oriented database, http://www.neo4j.org) instead of the original Postgres relational database.
  
  
• Logical topology design (beta): It lets you to design logical topologies for layer 3/4 networks (think of what you can do with Cisco Works at graphical level). You can also design topologies at application level, like to see what kind of DNS servers are related to a given box or how a Directory Services Tree is configured.
  
  
• Outside plant management (alpha): Long story short, you can place elements (poles, buildings, terminal elements, outdoor cabinets, cement junction boxes) on a map and connect them through links (cables, fibers) and containers (conduits, microwave links)
  

What's coming
According to our roadmap
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/kuwaiba/files/Docs/RoadmapKuwaiba.pdf/download),
the main features to come are:

• Enhancing the outside plant module (aka GISModule)
• Integrate logical models for SDH and MPLS networks.
• Provide reporting tools
• Provide south bound interfaces to extract information from NM (Network Manager), EM (Element Managers) and equipment to sync the inventory information.
• Get rid of a lot of annoying bugs.
  

Help Wanted!
We're always looking for beta testers and people with knowledge on telecommunications and IT management to refine requirements and design models. Any help on these regards (or any other thing) is greatly appreciated!

Licensing
EPL v1.0. There's also a version including the Neo4J libraries that are licensed GPL v2 through an OEM agreement

Versions
Current stable version: 0.4 (Guachené)
Development version: 0.5 alpha (Acandí)

Thanks!
Thanks to the NetBeans Platform community (developers and users) for helping us build a great desktop client with [almost] no hassle. We also want to thank to the Neo4J community, they changed the way we used to see persistence.