ABF is a workshop for creating customized forms-based applications. It takes you through the development of a new application by presenting a series of forms that you fill in and menus that have operations you can choose. The resulting application uses standard Ingres forms and menus to access a database and perform a variety of operations, including queries, updates, and reports.

ABF allows you to define, test, and run fully developed applications without having to use a conventional programming language. To enhance the applications with specialized processing, you can write scripts using 4GL. For a summary of the relationship between ABF and 4GL, see Overview of Tools and Languages. For detailed information on 4GL, see the 4GL part in this guide.