User:Kgi@***

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Kim Ginnerup

I'm a Technical Manager at Bording Data A/S where I have worked since 1983. I was part of the group that defined UNISTAR ERP in 1987. I first started using Ingres and ABF (Applications by Forms) in 1987. The first time I saw OpenROAD was when it was called Windows4GL in a beta version 0.9. I have been part of a small team where we developed a Windows4GL application that went live on Danish TV you can say that Windows4GL had a couple of million users that day. In UNISTAR we first began using OpenROAD from version 3.0 I guess it has been in 1995. We've used all of the intervening releases (OpenROAD 3.0, 3.5, 4.1…) and we now actively develop on OpenROAD 2006. We make extensive use of the OpenROAD eClient and OpenROAD Server technologies.

Thoughts on Open Source

The open sourcing of OpenROAD has the potential to make this one of the best development tools in the open source world. I am particularly looking forward to the OpenROAD runtime (3GL) being open sourced. The possibilities here are very significant. I recently traveled to the Dominican Republic to participate in the Ingres Open Engineering Summit '08. One of the "fun activities" :) there was a "development sprint" where in a short amount of time we tried to add a new feature to the product. Together with members of the OpenROAD development team we implemented a new system class in OpenROAD called the "HashObject" that made hash tables available to the 4GL developer. We got it working (well, almost -- a few last problems with the Find() method remained) and were able to demonstrate it to everyone at the closing presentation. We won the award for the best sprint! This type of collaboration, fast development time for new features and access to the source is the real benefit of open source.

UNISTAR and TransForge

We work with Ingres Corp on a regular basis as a partner. We are actively engaged in a major effort with them to upgrade the remaining parts of UNISTAR that are in ABF to OpenROAD using the TransForge tool. John Mahony has been instrumental in helping us get there but we have put a lot of work into it too. We are making code contributions back to Ingres Corp. to help improve TransForge (not yet open sourced) as well as the 4GL libraries that are part of OpenROAD (open source) to help solve the thorny problems of "query mode," "where qualifications" and "submenus" which you often find in ABF applications. TransForge is going to be able to handle more ABF applications with a higher level of automated transformation. we estimate that the "mode query and where qualification" will save us at least a year compared to a manual process.

My Projects

We are planning on open sourcing a number of tools that make developing and testing OpenROAD applications easier than it already is.

• IDL2OR (Interface Description Language to OpenROAD): Generates an OpenROAD Server application interface and an eClient proxy from an Interface Description Language (IDL) specification. IDL2OR can also generate a finalized Java Proxy. IDL is an abstract way of defining a "contract" between a client and a remote service. With IDL2OR, the developer simply needs to maintain the IDL specification and the tool has the ability to generate/update the appropriate client and server interfaces. There are different flavours of IDL. CORBA is well know and Microsoft has its own MIDL.
• VASE (Visual Application Server Explorer): A tool for inspecting, testing and debugging OpenROAD Server interfaces. VASE provides both visual inspection of OpenROAD Server interfaces (similar to the features found in the Visual OpenROAD Server Administrator) as well as the testing capabilities found in THUG. VASE can test both generated and handwritten Service Call Procedures (SCPs). VASE also adds the ability to debug SCPs by calling them "local" mode allowing the developer to step through the logic to be deployed on the server in the OpenROAD Workbench debugger.