Step‑by‑Step Guide to Building an Inventory Management System with Spring, Hibernate, and ExtJS

1. System Demonstration

The article begins with screenshots of the completed system, including the login page, admin homepage, menu management, role management, user management, product addition, warehouse management, supplier management, purchase order management, order export, inventory view, and purchase statistics.

2. System Requirement Analysis

The author explains the importance of requirement analysis, describing the purpose of the inventory management system, its functional modules, and the overall development process from requirement clarification to testing and deployment.

The main objectives of the project are to practice user‑centric requirement analysis, master development tools and open‑source software, become proficient with Spring, Spring MVC, Hibernate, ExtJS, and Maven, build a reusable base framework, and deploy a complete web application.

2.1 Problem Analysis

An inventory management system (also known as a supply‑chain management system) tracks procurement, stock, sales, and returns. The article focuses on a gas‑pipe inventory system, which treats gas pipes as a product and follows the same workflow from purchase order to storage and sales.

2.2 System Module Structure

The system is divided into six major modules: basic settings, purchase management, sales management, inventory management, statistical analysis, and system management. Roles such as admin, purchaser, salesperson, and inventory manager are defined.

2.3 Overall System Flow

The workflow starts with creating a super administrator (admin) who sets up roles and permissions. Admins add users and basic data. Purchasers input suppliers and purchase orders; salespeople input sales orders; inventory managers approve purchases and sales, updating stock accordingly. Statistics on purchases and sales are also available.

3. Development Environment Overview

Operating System: Windows 8.1

Java Version: JDK 1.8

Project Management: Maven

IDE: IntelliJ IDEA

Database: MySQL 5.1

Server: Tomcat 8.5

Backend Frameworks: Spring 4, Spring MVC, Hibernate 5

Frontend Framework: ExtJS 4.2 + JSP

Modeling Tools: PowerDesigner, Visio

3.1 Maven

Maven is an Apache automation tool for Java projects that handles build processes and dependency management. By declaring artifact coordinates, Maven downloads required JARs and their transitive dependencies from a central repository, reducing storage duplication and simplifying configuration for different environments.

3.2 IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA is a leading Java IDE offering powerful code completion, refactoring, debugging, and integration with version control and build tools. Compared with Eclipse, IDEA provides a more intuitive project structure and faster development workflow, especially with features like expression evaluation during debugging.

3.3 ExtJS

ExtJS is a JavaScript framework for building rich client‑side applications. It is independent of backend technology and is well‑suited for creating complex admin interfaces with robust data handling and charting capabilities.

Due to the length limit of the original WeChat article, the content is split into three parts; the next part will discuss the underlying architecture design.

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