Your First Odoo Application – A Practical Overview

Developing in Odoo most of the time means creating our own modules. In this chapter, we will create our first Odoo application and learn the steps needed to make it available to Odoo and install it.

Inspired by the notable http://todomvc.com/ project, we will build a simple To-Do application. It should allow us to add new tasks, mark them as completed, and finally clear the task list of all the already-completed tasks.

We will get started by learning the basics of the development workflow: we'll set up a new instance for your work, create and install a new module, and update it to apply the changes we make along with the development iterations.

Odoo follows an MVC-like architecture, and we will go through the layers during our implementation of the To-Do application:

• The model layer, defining the structure of the app's data
• The view layer, describing the user interface
• The controller layer, supporting the business logic of the application

Next, we will learn how to set up access control security and, finally, we will add some descriptions and branding information to the module.

Note that the concept of the term controller mentioned here is different from the Odoo web development controllers. These are program endpoints that web pages can call to perform actions.

With this approach, you will be able to gradually learn about the basic building blocks that make up an application and experience the iterative process of building an Odoo module from scratch.