Is ERPNext good for a location-based mobile app?

Frappe Framework App Development
1

Hello,

I have a custom mobile application. The app intensively uses real-time, live location ,among groups of users. The app is already running, live, and stable. Currently uses NodeJS, Sockets, and MongoDB.

My question is, and I am looking for experts opinions here, how feasible it’s to migrate (the whole app) to ERPNext for the back-end transactions?

We would use the front end for the dashboards, reports, etc, for admin use only,
But the major parts (for all users) will be integrated with a mobile app, especially for fetching and updating live locations.

Is ERPNext a good choice for a de-coupled/headless custom front end on a mobile application that needs frequent reads and writes of live locations of concurrent users?

For context:

  • PEAK concurrent users ~350. Peak. Rarely. Most of the time <100
  • Will use dedicated server with 128GB+ available RAM

Regards.

2

My opinion: no, not really. The path I would go is to connect to your existing stack that can do realtime with a Virtual Doctype. Virtual DocTypes

3

@tmatteson Did they backport those into a later edition of v13? Or are Virtual DocType still in beta 14 only?

@ahassoun I’m currently working in this space, where ERPNext is the brains and foundation of a de-coupled, database-less front end. The front-end is just a pure GUI. It is not doing intensive, real-time updates. But it is handling sporadic, live updates. The volume and intensity varying depending on date, time, and operation.

This is not something I would recommend to others, unless your GET/PUT/POST operations are really, really quick and simple. When they are not, and the ERP has to perform business logic? Then performance becomes a big challenge. I’ve had to get very creative (and make many changes to the core framework), to accomplish decent performance.

ERPNext is a generalist. It’s pretty okay at lots and lots of things. It’s not a specialist when it comes to performance and rapidly reading/writing data. There is a lot of overhead and extra work happening, which cannot be easily bypassed.

4

Frappe/ERPNext keeps blowing my mind. That’s a great feature that I did not know about.

Still not sure what the architecture would look like with Frappe + another standalone app. I’ll read more about how Virtual DocType can help.

Thank you, @tmatteson

5

It’s available in V13 but has several issues. I’m working on a PR to fix them up.

1 Like
6

@brian_pond Thank you so much for the insights. Since you are currently working in this space, I appreciate it if you could share more about the experience. No specific questions at the moment, but would love to hear more.

Thanks again!