OpenROAD provides all the components you need to deliver feature-rich business applications to the desktop. OpenROAD runtime supports Windows, UNIX, and Linux environments equally, so no matter what kind of computing environment you have, OpenROAD applications can be deployed to most major platforms.

The OpenROAD desktop environment is comprised of the OpenROAD VM and the Ingres/Net client. With this infrastructure you can write and deploy either client/server applications that access the database directly or thin client applications that access the database using the OpenROAD Server middleware platform. A desktop can even have a mix of both kinds of applications.

Deploying an OpenROAD application to the desktop is as simple as copying the application’s compiled image files and setting up a shortcut to run them in the VM. Client/server applications can connect to a database using Ingres/Net while thin client applications can connect to the OpenROAD Server using DCOM or HTTP.

Many organizations continue to find the simplicity of client/server applications the best way to build and deliver business application content to the desktop. OpenROAD, with its native support of SQL, allows client/server applications to be built without cumbersome calls to database drivers. An OpenROAD application can connect automatically to the database of your choice, and programmers can write SQL directly into the application code to fetch information from the database and place it in local variables, object classes, or even directly on the form. Updating the information in the database is just as easy.

Organizations looking to share business logic between multiple applications or support different types of client interfaces should consider deploying business logic in the OpenROAD Server. These interfaces include rich OpenROAD desktop or browser applications and ASP, JSP, Java, .NET, Web services and more. The high-performance middleware solution of the OpenROAD Server provides increased scalability through load balancing, database connection pooling, and failover capability and can run on any client interface.

For client/server and server applications, the default database connection can be altered at runtime to connect to a dynamically named database. This enables the same application to support a variety of organizations or environments without changing the code. OpenROAD applications also can be configured to not connect to a database and instead allow the application to decide which database to connect to through programmer control.

One powerful feature of the OpenROAD environment is the ability to connect simultaneously to an unlimited number of databases, allowing data from separate sources to be retrieved, displayed, and updated seamlessly.