Onboarding New Acumatica Developers

The first step should be installing a developer environment and going through the T-series & I-series of online training courses.  As described in the Quick-Start Guide for Developers, whatever the application solution that interacts with Acumatica you are planning to implement, you should first deploy a developer instance of Acumatica. For this purpose, your development environment will require Microsoft IIS, preferably installed locally, or somewhere you would have full control over IIS and the file system.  Additionally, you will require a database server – a version of Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL Server, where you have administrative rights. Please refer to Preparing for Installing Acumatica ERP section of the installation guide for details. It’s important to follow the Quick-Start guide which streamlines the process for developers, as the Installation Guide is rather IT-centric and geared more toward VARs.

Even though you may not have access to the Acumatica Portal, you can still install a fully functional instance of Acumatica by going through the T-100 course training.  We encourage companies who are not yet partners or customers to go through some training to learn more about the platform as well as their developers to help with the due diligence process by learning as much as possible about our developer platform and the xRP Framework.  Start with our Development Learning Path: the T-Series Courses  – beginning with the T-200 course, which introduces you to the Acumatica Framework), following through with more advanced developer training, as well as providing a number of resources we provide for developers. This will help cement any decision on moving forward with partnering with Acumatica.

Once a new developer gets their feet wet by completing the T-series courses – they will understand the key components of the Acumatica platform and their usage for typical tasks in application development. They will have gone through the process of developing a complete business application which will give them an idea of how to develop their own applications by using the Acumatica Framework.  Having this base understanding, the new developer has a number of options.  Depending on whether you intend to build an application from scratch or integrate with existing applications, the developer can move to more advanced training in the former case or continue with the I-series courses.

We now offer three developer training paths for developers – one for integration developers, one for framework application developers, and lastly one for mobile developers.

For developers who are looking for ways to integrate existing applications, they should start with the I-300 course, which covers the basic techniques of data retrieval through the Acumatica ERP OData interface and web services APIs and proceed through the series: I-310 – advanced web services and I-320 – data manipulation.

For those developers who will work on building additional functionality into the base product or building embedded applications, they should continue with the T-series courses which will advance their knowledge of the Framework as well as specific customization topics.

For more information on developer training, visit the Developer Training page. This page will be updated as changes to developer training occurs over time.

We have a number of developer guides that are useful references for developers.  These guides are aimed at specific audiences and are topical in nature.  Here is a list of the developer guides and respective links to the versions available as of this publication date:

• Customization Guide
• Mobile Framework Guide
• Plugin Development Guide
• Integration Development Guide
• Framework Development Guide

For other developer-related resources, see our Resources page.

Concurrent with the training, the new developer can get help on various issues they are surely to run into over time.  Of course, as engineers they likely will try to solve the particular issue they are having on their own. The documentation we offer is rather comprehensive and is available to everyone online via the Acumatica product help menu, online help system, and various product and developer guides enumerated above.

Once they have exhausted these resources, they can post a question on our Stackoverflow forum which our support staff monitor along with a number of Acumatica community developers around the world.  They can first search the questions on Stackoverflow to see if the question has been answered previously. If not, they can ask the question in the forum for someone to answer from our developer community.  If you are a partner, you can open up a case with us on our portal.  You can also access our knowledge-base on there as well.

We offer a number of live events both in-person and remotely that are intended to provide updates on the developer platform, address advanced topics, and provide best practices from both our internal developers and support people as well as members of our developer MVPs.

1. Summit Hackathon & Developer Track
2. Virtual Developer Conference
3. Developer Webinar Series

Lots of little useful developer nuggets exist in our Developer Blog.

There are several ways we share information to help developers build solutions on the Acumatica xRP platform:

• Events
• Online & In-person Training
• Developer & Product Guides
• Video Recordings
• Online Forums
• Knowledge-Base (Portal)
• Online Help