Revelation Software has announced the availability of a significant new release of OpenInsight (OI) Development Suite, which continues Revelation's commitment to extend OpenInsight by embracing new technologies as well as providing seamless integration with external databases. OI 9.2, which the company has been working on for more than 2 years, includes the new OpenInsight for Web (O4W) and SQL Connector.
OpenInsight for Web (O4W) is a web 2.0 development toolkit that enables OpenInsight developers to rapidly create browser-based forms, reports, menus, dashboards and programs. "O4W is a browser-based application to make browser-based applications. It will let our developers - or even power users - make web-based applications going against their existing OpenInsight data and they won't have to learn HTML or Java scripts or Java programming," Mike Ruane, president and CEO of Revelation Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "We made it browser-based - effectively, fill in the blanks, walk through the wizards - and you end up with web-based applications at the end."
The 9.2 release also includes SQL Connector, which allows SQL tables in relational database management systems such as SQL Server, MySQL and Oracle, to be seen as native tables to all components of OpenInsight, including forms, reports, popups, stored procedures and O4W. "While we could get that data before, it was a whole different series of functions," explains Ruane. "What we have done is built intelligence into the connector so that programmers that have been doing work, not just in OpenInsight, but any flavor of MultiValue, can now use that same knowledge base that they have, and go against data that used to be fairly difficult for them to get at." This is important, emphasizes Ruane, because DBMSs which used to be "so standalone and so proprietary" now really need to play well with each other nowadays. "People don't care about the database behind the system; they care about the data."
The new release also includes OpenInsight for D3, a connector that allows OpenInsight to be a front-end application development tool with the D3 database from TigerLogic Corporation; and Single Sign-On (SSO), which enables OpenInsight users to be authenticated via traditional OpenInsight methods, via Windows security, or via a combination of both.
Additional new components include Bitmap Indexes, a type of index used where the number of indexed values are relatively small such as Sex (M/F), or Active (Yes/No). Bitmap Indexes are extremely fast, and are much faster than existing Btree indexes; and OECGI3 (the OpenEngine Common Gateway Interface version 3), which supports Failover and Load Balancing modes. These modes make OECGI3 a more robust connection object and allows for extra capacity and/or redundancy to be added to a web application.
OpenInsight Development Suite 9.2 can be purchased as a front-end development toolkit for the U2, D3 and SQL Server databases. "With the release of OpenInsight 9.2 we have introduced new licensing which allows both MultiValue and SQL developers to purchase OpenInsight as a front end development toolkit without our Linear Hash database," notes Robert Catalano, director of sales, Revelation Software. "When purchased as a toolkit only, the price is $60 per user with a minimum of 10 users for web-based applications."
OpenInsight Development Suite 9.2 is available from Revelation Software, or through their network of resellers. Go here for more product details.