When I started working at Ingres in Dublin back in 1992 one of the first projects I was assigned was to port Ingres to IBM OS/2. At that time the Windows4GL team was also undertaking an OS/2 port, and I was able to leverage much of the work that Joe Kronk, Puree Charoenpong, and the rest of the Windows4GL team had done to complete the first port of the DBMS to a desktop platform. I was curious about the Windows4GL technology and within weeks of joining Ingres I sat through an introductory Windows4GL training class. I was amazed at how quickly I could build relatively complex data-centric applications with a cool GUI interface.

In the intervening years, significant improvements were made to the technology. Windows4GL was renamed OpenROAD (Open Rapid Object Application Development) to emphasize the fact that it’s an open development environment, not just for Ingres, with which you can unlock data and business logic on a variety of platforms from DB2 on the mainframe to SQL Server on the desktop.

For those of you not familiar with Ingres OpenROAD, there’s a lot of useful information and webinars at: http://community.ingres.com/wiki/Ingres_OpenROAD_Learn

You may have seen the press announcement yesterday that we have contributed Ingres OpenROAD to the open source community. This decision was a direct result of lobbying from developers within the Ingres OpenROAD community. We tested their commitment to the project by challenging them to contribute something to the community in advance of the announcement and, as you can see from the press release, we’ve already received some valuable contributions.

The process of preparing a commercially developed product for contribution to the open source community is a lengthy one and the Ingres OpenROAD team, together with key community constituents, deserves significant kudos for the work done. I was helping with some last-minute testing over the weekend and was impressed with how easy they’ve made it for developers to roll up their sleeves and get involved. If you visit the Community page at http://community.ingres.com/wiki/Ingres_OpenROAD_Community you’ll see that we’ve already signed up a number of new community members and we’re maintaining a growing list of projects at http://community.ingres.com/wiki/Ingres_OpenROAD_Projects.

I asked my colleague David Tondreau for a succinct description of Ingres OpenROAD and I believe he captured its very essence in the following:

“OpenROAD is truly what its name professes: “Open Rapid Object Application Development”. With the open sourcing of OpenROAD, Ingres Corp. has put the true “open” in OpenROAD. Put very simply, OpenROAD is the fastest way to build Ingres applications.”

 

  Posted in Community

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.