Thoroughbred Mission

Thoroughbred’s formal Mission is to provide the most highly portable language development environments for developers creating end-user business applications.

The word “Portable” has been used widely in the software industry, and people attribute many different meanings to it. Thoroughbred itself has two distinct developer requirements in mind when committing to portable language development environments.

Firstly, developers wish to be able to design an application for their chosen markets once, and then implement it on many different hardware and software environments, depending on their own customer’s needs and preferences. Thoroughbred‘s mission is to deliver this portability, allowing the developer to maintain only a single application code set.

Secondly, developers have invested heavily, designing applications for the end-user business market, and need to be able to conserve that past investment. Changes in technology, costs, and the competitive environment will drive them to adapt and enhance their applications, but Evolution, rather than Revolution, is the preferred strategy. Thoroughbred takes responsibility for enabling developers to choose this strategy. Ten, or even five years ago, it was possible to deliver the Evolution capability by guaranteeing upward portability in the programming language.

More recently, demands for evolution have become more complex. Evolution requirements include the enhancement of the user interface of their application to support graphical presentation (GUI), or the data environment to encompass Client/Server architectures. Thoroughbred’s solution to this level of portability is based on the Dictionary-IV system dictionary. Thoroughbred guarantees that all applications based on Dictionary-IV will operate without change in all environments supported by Thoroughbred.

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