Applications you develop using OpenROAD are largely independent of the DBMS in use, and can be easily ported from one DBMS to another with little or no changes in the underlying code.

Using OpenROAD, you can develop applications without writing and maintaining multiple versions of each application for different computing platforms. You can confidently meet the demands for enterprise-wide, n-tier applications that support hundreds of users in many departments in multiple locations across platforms, even across the intranet or Internet.

This explains the Open in OpenROAD—the applications you develop are wide open in terms of user interface, platform, and DBMS—but what about ROAD? ROAD stands for Rapid Object Application Development, which means you can develop applications quickly in a fully object-oriented, IDE that includes a repository, the Workbench, a class browser, a debugger, interactive testing tools, and templates. The objects that you create for one application can be reused by other applications, further speeding up the development process.