Ingres OpenROAD
Ingres OpenROAD
OpenROAD stands for "Open Rapid Object Application Development".
Ingres OpenROAD is a rapid application development and flexible deployment solution. With Ingres OpenROAD, developers can quickly build and deploy sophisticated high performance and high availability business applications on a variety of platforms, accessing a broad range of data sources. As a result, you can react to business changes faster and protect your investment in existing mainframe and client server data and applications.
Rapidly and cost effectively build applications that meet today's high performance and availability needs
Quickly deploy those applications across a variety of platforms
Protect existing system and database investments by integrating them with new applications
Re-use existing and third-party components, speeding development further
Decouple business logic from presentation and database functions increasing performance and availability incrementally and inexpensively
Re-deploy applications to other platforms without changing code
Easily expose business logic as a web service
It is a 4GL development language which include a suite of development tools, with built in IDE (Written in OpenROAD), Code Repository, allowing applications to be developed and deployed on Microsoft and UNIX/LINUX platforms.
OpenROAD started out life in the early nineties as a product called Windows 4GL. When Ingres was re-badged as OpenIngres, the new name of OpenROAD was born. Since that time it has been through a number of major developments; the current version is OpenROAD 2006.
OpenROAD 4.1 introduced an interface to ActiveX controls, providing access to ActiveX control attributes and methods within the language for the brave. This mechanism often requires 'Wrapper' DLLs to be written to handle data type issues, one of which being a 2000 character limit on strings of text.
Ingres (database)
Ingres is a commercially supported, open-source SQL relational database management system intended to support large commercial and government applications. Ingres is fully open source with a growing global community of contributors, but Ingres Corporation controls the development of Ingres and makes certified binaries available for download, as well as providing worldwide support.
Ingres was first created as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley, starting in the early 1970s and ending in the early 1980s. The original code, like that from other projects at Berkeley, was available at minimal cost under a version of the BSD license. Since the mid-1980s, Ingres has spawned a number of commercial database applications, including Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, NonStop SQL and a number of others. Postgres (Post Ingres), a project which started in the mid-1980s, later evolved into PostgreSQL.
Ingres is ACID and is fully transactional (including all DDL statements).
Ingres 9.3 was released on October 7, 2009,it is a limited release targeted at new application development on Linux and Windows only. Ingres 9.3 is not an upgrade path for existing Ingres installations or applications.
Ingres 10 was released on October 12, 2010, which is a full release, supporting upgrade from earlier versions of the product. Currently available on 32- and 64-bit Linux, 32-bit Windows and Solaris Sparc.
Language structure
The syntax of OpenROAD is very closely linked to that of the Ingres database, with direct support for embedded SQL. In a similar way to other event based programming languages, code can be placed in groups for related windows/system events.
The syntax is similar to Microsoft Visual Basic, allowing OpenROAD users to quickly adapt to Visual Basic with the help of Intellisense.
Intellisense is still not available (Q2 of 2008) in the OpenROAD IDE, however editors like TextPAD have syntax files that allow colour coding of source files using key word recognition.
OpenROAD comes with system classes with following functionality:
application source (allows to dynamically fetch, create, modify source artifacts)
database access
data types (scalar and complex)
runtime control
visual forms (incl. common widgets and controls)
Features
object oriented language: class, simple inheritance (no interfaces, currently no constructor/destructor but planned for version 5.0)
Cross platform support
Integrated Debugger/IDE
Integrated Application Server
Support for Windows CE development (V5.0)
Support for VB.Net/Java Integration
Platforms
OpenROAD application can be deployed on the following clients :- Thin Client (Web), Windows, and various flavours of Linux/Unix.
It has support for n-tier systems by using the OpenROAD Application Server. The Application Server can be deployed on Windows or Linux/Unix platforms.
It has built in support for the Ingres database, or one of the following using a product called Enterprise Access: Oracle, SQL Server or DB2, which allows the client to use the same SQL syntax for all target databases.
