Revelation held its Revelation University 2008 roadshow in Sydney, Australia, and in Auckland, New Zealand, last week, providing an opportunity for attendees from the Asia-Pacific region to learn first-hand about features to be offered in the next major release of OpenInsight from Revelation president and CEO Mike Ruane. The reaction at the Sydney and Auckland presentations was “incredibly positive,” said Ruane. “People wanted to use it immediately.”
OpenInsight, Revelation’s flagship product, is a repository-based applications development environment that enables development teams to work collaboratively to design, develop, deploy and scale high-performance business solutions. OpenInsight's complete tool set (including a Form Designer, Editor/Debugger, UI Workspace, and XML Workspace), advanced BASIC+ scripting language and client/server development provide a complete environment for deploying and evolving network applications.
Currently in beta, with general availability expected this quarter, the new release encompasses over 4,000 entity changes, Ruane told DBTA. “We have improved it by an order of magnitude.” Representing a key new capability, the new release will include the Sierra Bravo dashboard, noted Robert Catalano, director of sales at Revelation. “We reached an agreement with Sierra Bravo Corp. to include the Bravo Dashboard as part of OpenInsight release 9.0," said Catalano. “The dashboard provides business metrics in a graphical presentation on a user’s desktop. It is a very fine product and fits a need for our end-users.”
In addition to the dashboard, the new release also offers a new print engine, called OIPI.net, to achieve a richer experience for users, said Ruane. “They can now see thumbnails, they can search and or copy from the print preview of the reports, save in additional formats such as .docx or .xlsx, password-protected PDF files—so we have really expanded the capability of the existing reports,” he noted. As a result, with a move to 9.0, Ruane said, “anybody using OpenInsight, just by applying this upgrade, gets the benefit of this brand-new print engine, without changing any of their code.”
OpenInsight 9.0 offers features specifically directed at developers’ needs. New WebOI tools are also integrated into OpenInsight 9.0. WebOI enables developers to use existing application components like Windows, Popups and stored procedures via a Web-browser for reuse and integration. With WebOI, said Ruane, “if you are a developer and you have an existing OpenInsight system, WebOI will actually look at the existing forms, find out the tables that they are working with, the columns on these tables, and it will create a Web-based form based on the information in the OpenInsight form.”
Additional upgrades aimed specifically at developers in this release, noted Catalano, include a more modern IDE interface that is akin to Visual Studio, as well as a Web development toolkit. For more information, go here. http://www.revelation.com/