Questions about the NAIUA? Send E-mail to
Questions about these web pages? Send E-mail to
Back to the OpenROAD Page
Back to the NAIUA Home Page
Periodically Durwin Wright, the development manager for OpenROAD 4.0, posts messages to the OpenROAD mailing list to update readers on the status of OpenROAD 4.0. Some of these messages are listed below:
To the OpenROAD Users Group Members:
For those of you who do not know me, I am Durwin Wright. I manage the OpenROAD 4.0 development group.
I just got back from a very exciting Australian Ingres World 97 at CA-Expo held in Melbourne. I got a chance to sit down and talk to a number of OpenROAD customers. We were primarily showing the OR 4.0 functionality and discussing both near term and long term plans. We had a lot of fun!
We held a meeting this morning and now have a very clear idea of the action items and timeframes required to take this product to a GA status. Quite frankly, we want an initial GA release that can be considered production quality.
Our criteria for GA status are as follows:
We are preparing a BETA 2 REFRESH that will be shipped to all existing BETA sites automatically. We will be soliciting additional people to be added to the BETA 2 testing.
We are projecting a BETA 3 REFRESH that should be very nearly identical to the GA version. We want this refresh to go to a very wide distribution.
If you have not received your OpenROAD 4.0 BETA 1, do not worry. You will not miss anything. I recommend that if you are not in the BETA program currently, wait until BETA 2 is out (which should be within a few weeks).
This job has become a lot of fun. The first couple of years for me was very hard but over the last three months the progress that we have been making with the product has been phenomenal. We did lose several members of our staff. We have recently hired a number of replacements (and are still looking for more senior developers -- especially if they have prior Ingres development expertise).
One of the things that we have recently done in OpenROAD that was different from the past was to physically separate the functional areas required for development, support and downstream activities.
The support and development staffs are roughly equal in size (development is a little larger). Even though members of each group work side by side and may somethimes do both support and development activities, each group has an unambiguous set of responsibilities.
Between the two groups we have over forty developers and support engineers. This does not include people that work on OpenROAD but are part of other organizations. These other organizations include the following:
OpenROAD 4.0 has taken a very long time to complete. However, the time that we took to build this product has been well spent. We were determined to engineer a product that would provide the basis for the exploitation of technologies that our customers have been asking us to provide. Most of the change that has gone into OpenROAD 4.0 is "under the covers" and will be not be evident when you first see the product (It is, however, a radically different look and feel). Although OpenROAD 4.0 can be considered a "catch-up" release, it has a very solid foundation that has been designed to allow us to extend the product very quickly. It really should be considered a completely different product.
The OpenIngres Exploitation sub-project has allowed the OpenROAD group to get out of the business of duplicating the effort of the OpenIngres development group. This has allowed me to apply more resources into the actual OpenROAD product. It has also allowed the distribution of peripheral OpenROAD development activities to other groups. We now a very seamless marriage of OpenIngres and OpenROAD technologies that should make most (if not all) of the issues regarding OpenROAD and OpenIngres co-existence and operation to go away.
The Workbench looks great. We are now starting to fine tune its behavior and add things that will make it an even more clean and intuitive interface to use when building applications. There is a lot of capability that we have built into the product that will form the basis for near-term future extensions. We want to work closer with our VARs to add features and functionality that will allow them to exploit some previously hidden capabilities present in OpenROAD.
We are extremely excited by our new External Class Support. ActiveX is the first implemention using this infrastructure. We and our BETA customers have been using it to integrate various ActiveX controls into OpenROAD. This interface makes the control look like just another OpenROAD system class. This design is significant because we built it with both CORBA and ActiveX in mind. As long as the external class server can present attributes, methods and events the External Class infrastructure can be adapted by the development staff to support other object oriented interfaces. (We are completing a prototype in which we have used the Jasmine ActiveX interface to build an OpenROAD 4.0 front end to Jasmine. We have another demo that shows OpenROAD using various ActiveX controls such as: Internet Controls, Rich Text Edit, Excel, Microsoft Interative Agent and others.)
We not only have exploited the use of native Windows controls in OpenROAD but we have figured out how to port OpenROAD 4.0 to Unix -- with no lost in functionality!!! This includes TreeView, ListView, TabFolder and other controls that you would not normally expect to see on Unix. This will include ActiveX as well. The resulting application is a native Motif interface that can have its look and feel dynamically selected by either the application or end user to be either Windows or Motif. Our estimated time per Unix port will be between 15 and 45 elapse days.
Subsequent major releases of OpenROAD will not take very long to complete. The painful part of this journey has been completed.
We plan to provide a series of functional releases on a predictable and periodic basis. Our marketing organization will be working with selected partners and clients to expose both short-term and long-term plans.
Be assured that we will be addressing a number of issues in a timely manner by the use of this technology. These issues will include: thin clients and server deployment of OpenROAD, NFS installation and deployment, better software change control and support for third party products, running OpenROAD from web applications, support for tp monitors and other features.
We have been taking a very hard look at the product in recent months. We have decided that nothing will be sacred. However, we want to strike a balance between our business needs, what our customers want and what can be done in a timely manner.
I am very excited about this product. We are working on some very interesting projects. I cannot wait to see your faces when the entire picture starts to unfold and you see where we are headed.
I want to thank the user community for sticking with OpenROAD while we were involved in this re-engineering effort. I am continually amazed by the dedication of the OpenROAD users. I enjoyed talking to our clients during the last user group meeting. I am looking forward to seeing those of you who will be attending CA-World 98 next April.
Durwin Wright Manager, Research and Development Alameda Development Center Computer Associates International, Inc. wridu01@cai.com 510-748-2477 510-748-2550 (fax)
Hello All,
I would like to provide a short explanation as to what we are trying to accomplish and our goals in restructing how data is accessed by OpenROAD. In doing this I need to expose to you the design objectives that we are using when formulating our plans.
The changes that we made to OpenROAD 4.0 (and other changes that we have made to the product) have been done to either implement or position OpenROAD to meet the these objectives.:
The following sections will expand on each objective.
The Enterprise Access product family was designed to provide this interface. Our core development platforms are: Windows NT, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX. These platforms will have the enterprise access products built as part of the development process. Enterprise Access products will be built for other platforms at the same time as the OpenIngres port is done for that platform.
On a Windows NT environment, the enterprise access products will be packaged with OpenROAD. (OpenROAD will be packaged on the OpenIngres CD). Each enterprise access server can be configured to run as a Windows Service and to start up automatically.
The enterprise access server does not have to run on the same platform as the target database. It can run on any supported platform and use the native vendor provided networking components to communicate with any database on any platform that the vendor supports.
Everything on this list is either in GA, BETA, QA or complete prototype phase.
In addition to this list we will be building interfaces to Tuxedo. Our plans also include supporting CORBA, C++ and JAVA classes as OpenROAD external classes. (We already can support Jasmine Classes via the Jasmine ActiveX control).
In OpenROAD 4.0 we have made changes that will make it easier to install and administer the product in a NFS (readonly) environment without any lost in functionality for BOTH development and runtime.
Our prototyping indicates that the Windows 95 and Windows NT client disk footprint will be in the neighborhood of 20K bytes! This 20K byte installation will be able to be configured as either an OpenROAD development or and OpenROAD runtime environment. Via the previous objective, it will be able to develop and deploy applications against OpenIngres, Oracle, Informix, Sybase and MS SQL Server. Applications can be deployed against Rdb, RMS, DB2, CA-Datacom, CA-IDMS, IMS/VS, Allbase/SQL or VSAM/CICS datasources.
This interface will also form the basis to allow OpenROAD applications to be partitioned. Expect to see more in this area early in 1998.
The work is hard. I spend on the average of 11 hours a day and six days a week at work (I have no life). I enjoy what I am doing. This is more fun and exciting than anything that I did while I was a part of either RTI, Ingres or ASK. My group is motivated and efficient. We have good working relationships with other CA groups. Our future looks bright. We are hiring new employees in Alameda. Our group is also expanding. I feel priviledged and lucky to be able to serve such a great community of people.
Durwin Wright Manager, Research and Development Alameda Development Center Computer Associates International, Inc. wridu01@cai.com 510-748-2477 510-748-2550 (fax)
Editor's note: Since the November 1997 messages update much of the information from Durwin's earlier messages, I have edited out much of the content except for information which is still relevant.
5. We now need sites to start to sign up for the BETA program. In order
to sign up the following must happen:
A. Have your CA representative contact the Ingres product analyst,
Alice Ortiz (phone is 617-342-2531, email is lopal01@cai.com),
to request that your site sign up for the OpenROAD 4.0 BETA.
B. You may want to sign up for the OI 2.0 BETA as well (this is not
a requirement).
C. Development will provide support during the BETA cycle for OpenROAD
4.0 testing. In order to accomodate this, all problems will be reported
via StarTrak (or WebTCC). These problems will be queued directly to
the OpenROAD Development Queue. (Ingres Level 1 personnel have been
instructed to requeue these issues to Development.) Please be as
detailed as you can be in the description of the problem that you
encounter. We will communicate to you via telelphone, email or via
updates in the Startrak issue.
It will be to your advantage to obtain a WebTCC userid so that you
can report problems directly to development via your Web Browser.
This is also the interface that you will be able to check on the
status of problems reported when the developers update the Startrak
issue associated with your problem.
D. The environments that we are looking for BETA sites are as follows:
Client Environment: Windows 95 -OR-
Windows NT (3.51 or 4.0)
Server Environment: Ingres 6.4 (on separate system) -OR-
OpenIngres 1.2 on same system if NT -OR-
OpenIngres 1.2 on separate system -OR-
OpenIngres 2.0 on same system if NT -OR-
OpenIngres 2.0 on separate system -OR-
(possibly) OpenIngres 1.2 desktop on same system
The Unix and driver testing will follow different time frames.
(The Solaris Port is coming along very nicely. This is NOT
running under an emulator but is a native Solaris port built
on top of OI 2.0 Solaris and X/Motif. We plan to show
OR 4.0 running on Solaris at CA-World97.)
In the BETA questionaire, please indicate which other platforms that
you use and which data sources that your need access to from OpenROAD.
We are very proud of the development effort that has been put into this project.
We expect this project to be a success and are looking forward to working with
everyone who will be part of the BETA program.
Thanks to all the people who are using the product and who have helped in the
past and in the future.
Sincerely,
Durwin Wright
Development Manager
Computer Associates
You may be wondering what we have done with OpenROAD 4.0. Here is a summary of the major changes that we have made:
This represents a major re-engineering of the product. The first five items in the list represent our main objectives for the product. As part of this effort we have worked very closely with the OpenIngres 2.0 developers and are now sharing a common development environment with them. There are numerous other enhancements in the product, some are visible while others are considered to be infra-structure changes. For example, one enhancement that some people may consider to be more important than those on the previous list are 3D-controls. While 3D-controls is a significant enhancement, we consider it to be an infrastructure change.
I think that you will find the Active X/(D)COM support both interesting and very useful. The potential uses of this interface are virtually unlimited. I have been amazed at some of the uses that it has been put to already. I cannot wait to see what our users will do with it.
I also believe that you will find the OpenIngres integration complete and seamless. We are exploiting everything in OpenIngres that we can. Using OpenROAD to manipulate BLOBs is very easy and intuitive -- no user written data handlers are needed.
If you wish to have more information about this product and other OpenIngres related products, then watch the Computer Associates Ingres Home Page (http://www.cai.com/products/ingres.htm) for the relevant white papers and product announcements.
Questions about the NAIUA? Send E-mail to
Questions about these web pages? Send E-mail to
Back to the OpenROAD Page
Back to the NAIUA Home Page