An extensible system

The OpenTime plugins follow the Eclipse philosophy of exposing a set of "hooks" or extension points. These hooks are intended to allow organizations to write and deploy custom designed or third party OpenTime extensions and thus, to have the OpenTime system deployed according to there specific needs.

For example, the OpenTime workflow model is exposed so that closing, approving, rejecting a timesheet can trigger a TimesheetProcessor that will process (analyze, copy, transmit, move) the affected timesheet using the full set of OpenTime APIs and any other Java API they need. Similarly, changes to the list of projects, activities, cost centers etc can be intercepted by an OpenTime extension that maintains synchronicity between the desktop (or laptop) and server databases.

An embedded database

OpenTime for Eclipse makes use of an embedded, relational, SQL-aware database (HSQLDB). This means that OpenTime users (and developers) can rely on the the richness, flexibility and reliability of an SQL database. To exploit OpenTime data, extensions have the choice to:

  1. Access the data through the OpenTime object model without ever writing any SQL. This is by virtue fo the Hibernate object relational persistence service.This the safe and recommended means of accessing OpenTime data.
  2. Access the database directly through SQL or any valid O/R mapping tool.


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