GARDENIA user manual, containing install and usage instructions is not available yet.

Alternativelly, you may find information on the following links:

• README.pt.txt - General Information and Credits, in Portuguese
• README.en.txt - General Information and Credits, in English
  
• README.source.txt - README file (english) for the source code. contains build instructions for the source code, and install instructions for GARDENIA Desktop and Enterprise Editions.
• Licence-LGPL.txt - User Licence for GARDENIA (Open Source, LGPL), in portuguese and english (at the end of the file)
• General Discussion Forum - General discussion forum in English. The best reference to solve questions, it is frequently monitored by the development team.
• Project page on em SourceForge - Project page on SourceForge (website for open-source projects hosting). Contains links for downloading source code, installation packages, discussion forums, mailing lists, CVS source code repository, new functionality requests, problems/bugs reporting, etc.

Install Instructions - GARDENIA Desktop Edition

Download Gardenia Desktop Edition. There are two versions, one for all operating systems (gardenia-desktop-0.9.xx-installer.jar), and other one only for windows systems (gardenia-desktop-0.9.xx-installer-win32.exe), that includes the JRE - JAVA Runtime Environment.
Note: If you already have a JRE (Java Runtime Environment) installed on your computer, download the .jar editions, since it has a smaller size).

To install, just double-click on the downloaded installer file, or (in unix/linux, for the .jar version) type on command line: java -jar gardenia-desktop-0.9.xx-installer.jar .

Follow the installation wizard instructions. The installation program will create icons on your desktop to launch the GARDENIA Desktop Edition.

Note: Alternativelly you may use the gardenia.sh (unix) or gardenia.bat (windows)  scripts to launch gardenia (they are at sub-dir bin under GARDENIA install dir. E.g.: /home/appj/GardeniaDesktop/bin/gardenia.sh or C:\Program Files\Gotham\GardeniaDesktop\bin\gardenia.bat)

Fist Login and Initial Configurations

Click on Gardenia icon on desktop. This will launch GARDENIA Desktop Edition. By pressing the "Entrar" or "Enter" button on application,  the default web browser will be launched,showing the authentication page. 

The system has a default used created on installation, with the following credentials:

Default User Username: admin

Default User Password: benfica 

For security reasons, change this password as soon as possible. :-).

After the first login and to test the system, the following actions are recommended: 

• Change the administrator password, and create an username for each application user. Menu "Administration/Users".
• Change the Gardenia Configuration Parameters,mainly the company data (name, vat number, address, logo file, etc), since this data is used on documents creation. Menu "Administration/Config. Parameters
• Check the prefixes and desired numbering for the documents (e.g., the invoices by default has the "FAC-" prefix, and the next serial number as 1. This way, the next invoice will be "FAC-000001"). Menu Administration/Document Types.
• Create your products. On menu "Products"
• Create at least one Customer and one Supplier, on menu "Customers/Suppliers" (note that the same entity can be at the same time customer and supplier).
• After these steps, if can now create documents (invoices, cash invoices, etc). Go to "Documents - Issuing" and click "New". Choose your document type, customer, and click "Save".
• Note that an invoice initially is in the status "Editing". To finally create the invoice (and be able to print it), you have to change its status to "OPEN".

Technical Information

GARDENIA is an open-source project, developed using J2EE technology (Java, JSP, TagLibs) and use several open-source tools, libraries and frameworks.

Most used are JDBForms - http://jdbforms.sf.net for the web interface and data access, and Jasper Reports - http://jasperreports.sf.net for the management reports and for generation of documents to be printed (invoices, cash invoices, etc). 

It runs on a J2EE compliant web application server (servlet/jsp engine) like Tomcat and Jetty. For persistence, an SQL relational database is used, like Hipersonic (HSQL) or FireBirdSQL.

The GARDENIA GUI runs completely in a web environment (JAVA JSPs and servlets), over HTTP protocol. 

GARDENIA Desktop Edition is composed by a GUI application developed using XUL (XML User Interface Language) and JAVA, created with the Thinlet project). This application launches an embeded java database engine (Hypersonic HSQL ) and a embeded web server (Jetty), and throught an button on GUI lauches the default web browser on system with the address http://127.0.0.1/gardenia/. The Desktop and Enterprise editions all share the same source code for the web application.

The installation  package was created with IzPack   (installation package generator for java), and the windows version for this installer (also created with IzPack) includes a JRE.

The build procedure from source code and install packages generatil is created with Apache ANT build tool.

GARDENIA is developed in Unix/Linux, and tested on Unix/Linux and Windows, with Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer web browsers.

GARDÉNIA source code is available (according to the LGPL license) from the project web site on SourceForge: http://gardenia.sf.net and http://sf.net/projects/gardenia/.