OpenROAD is a completely self-contained environment for application development, providing all the tools you need to build and test your applications. OpenROAD Workbench offers an extendable GUI with drag-and-drop interfaces. Event-based capabilities enable user-defined, external class, and database events. Workplace tools includes a debugger with extensive built-in tracing for interactive testing and a Visual OpenROAD Server Administrator for configuration.

The development environment supplies an object-oriented system class hierarchy and reusable application objects that are stored in a shared object repository. OpenROAD includes an application library of predefined templates to which you can add your own reusable application component templates that can encapsulate classes, scripts, and menus.

OpenROAD supports a wide range of external call interfaces. It allows 4GL applications to register and call 3GL procedures. External class support enables OpenROAD to incorporate or drive ActiveX, Component Object Model (COM), or Distributed COM (DCOM) controls and components, including web browser, office, and reporting software. It can also invoke and manage operating system command scripts.