**MultiValue market: Pick - UniVerse - UniData - U2 - jBase - Reality - ONware - D3 - mv*BASE - mvENTERPRISE - Advanced Revelation - OpenInsight - UniVision - OpenQM - Cache
Revelation Software London RUG Report
Written by: Elkie Holland
Event date: 13 July 2010
On
Tuesday, July 13, 2010, in Paddington,
Revelation Software just released version 9.2 of their Database and Application Development tool, OpenInsight, and this release included native database connectivity tools for Tiger Logic’s D3 data servers, for SQL Servers, reporting enhancements, and much more.
The day started with a
continental breakfast as the attendees wandered in and rekindled
relationships. At the appointed time,
Martyn Phillips, Business Development
Manager at
Revelation Software
Mike gave a brief presentation describing OpenInsight v9.2 and its new features touching on Revelation's plans to support 64 bit later this year. It appears that Revelation Software has been extremely busy with product development since 2008 and there have been over 1,900 new / changed entities. OpenInsight 9.2 went into Beta testing early in April 2010 and has a release date of 15 July 2010. Mike reported that during 2009 sales had held pretty constant with those of 2008 with a lot of ARev32 conversions along with conversions from other MultiValue vendors.
Mike then began demonstrating some of the features available in the OpenInsight 9.x series. These included:
| ● | New TCL security, features, and reporting functionality |
| ● | Enhanced capabilities for EditTables, the control used in OpenInsight for MultiValued data |
| ● | Improved .Net functionality and Interaction |
| ● | New I18N features and functionality |
| ● | A new pricing model |
| ● | Single sign-on which allows users to log into an app via OpenInsight, Windows Security or both and is designed to make life easier for Administrators. This also allows users to be set up in groups. |
| ● | Newer .Net functionality |
A number of questions were asked and comments made.
After a short break, Carl Pates of Sprezzatura Ltd took the podium. Carl spent the afternoon with a very hands-on demonstration of what a WebBrowser control is and how it should and could be used. He covered in detail:
| ● | Embedding the control in forms |
| ● | Loading static content |
| ● | Loading dynamic content |
| ● | Event handling from Basic+ |
| ● | The command interface |
A favourite sound bite from Carl would have to be:
“HTML is not a display-only technology but it’s dynamic and interactive.”
Carl mentioned that:
Full documentation on the WebBrowser control could be found at the MSDN website at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa752040(VS.85).aspx
Carl also showed how to extend a User Interface using a large range of free and commercially-licensed “widgets”.
The 3 widget links which Carl suggested were:
- Accordian (Free)
- Toolbar (Free)
- TreeViews, Grids, TabBars etc
- Tree menus
- Tabs
- As Carl put it: “everything you could think of ….”
After a lunch break in the Hotel’s restaurant, the afternoon continued with Mike Ruane again, this time showing OpenInsight’s new SQL Connector technology. OpenInsight can already talk natively to most flavours of MultiValue data, but SQL used to be a problem. Older versions of OpenInsight could use SQL as a data source, but the interface was not using the Basic+ or DataBasic techniques that MultiValue developers were familiar. With OpenInsight’s SQL connectors, once a connection and dataset have been defined through a wizard and saved ( a one time process ), developers can then use the OPEN, SELECT, READ, WRITE, etc statements to manipulate data on the SQL server, in real time. Very powerful stuff.
Mike also made the point that when OpenInsight is being used only as a front-end tool to a data source other than OpenInsight’s native database, that the pricing is entirely different: about $60 US per seat, with a $10 US annual license fee - email Martyn for UK pricing.
Once Mike was done showing the connectors and answering questions regarding them, Mike then launched into the O4W presentation. OpenInsight for the Web, or O4W, is a browser-based tool for making browser-based applications. These applications talk to an OpenInsight data server, so they can work with any of the data sources that OpenInsight works with, including SQL, Tiger Logic’s D3, or Rocket’s U2 data sources.
O4W lets a developer, or even a power user, walk through a series of questions and "fill in the blanks" screens in the browser, and then creates powerful Web 2.0 version of whatever you were designing: a form, a menu, a report, or a dashboard. There is no need to write any code for these screens, but the ability to either support the forms with code, or create the forms completely from code is there. It all depends upon how comfortable the developer is, and what level of functionality is required. It seemed to be a product with a lot of promise for those who needed to get applications up to the web or to the browser quickly, and is included with OpenInsight 9.2 - no extra charge !
There seemed to be some excitement about O4W and the enhancements and everyone seemed to find the day most useful and informative.
