Development Environment

In addition to the focus on usability for the OPENworkshop end-user, Thoroughbred has concentrated on providing a highly flexible and accessible environment for developers. To a great extent this has been achieved by the simple tactic of implementing the developer’s interface to the system using OPENworkshop Classes and Methods.

The developer’s environment positively encourages an incremental development methodology. All OPENworkshop Classes are easily available to the developer at all times, and can be modified as the application is running. Most changes that the developer can make are effective immediately, so the developer can see the results immediately.

For example, when a Menu is displayed the developer can select “Edit” to edit the definition of that Menu. When the editing is finished, OPENworkshop will re-displays the Menu in its revised form, so the developer can see and check the results immediately. The same facility is provided for View, Screen and Help. Similar capabilities exist for Link, Format, and Data-name.

OPENworkshop also provides the developer with a comprehensive testing and debugging toolkit. Data and control status can be inspected at any time through an online debug system.

A complete cross-referencing system shows the structure and relationships within the system for the developer. These relationships are displayed using OPENworkshop Views, thus providing all the search and selection facilities the developer needs. In addition, the developer can point to any item in the View, and select it to display or edit the OPENworkshop Object directly, further increasing the high degree of accessibility of OPENworkshop Class definitions.

Any environment that is so open to developers’ needs to be protected from accidental or over-inquisitive access by end users. OPENworkshop has security protection that disables or enables this access, by passwords and user logins.

From the OPENworkshop Reference, version 8.9.1. Open this page in the PDF