Members of the OpenROAD development team, Bodo Bergman, Brigitte Duplenne, and Joe Kronk along with Kim Ginnerup, Matt Rendell, Roy Deal Simon, and Oliver Oyston participated in an OpenROAD Sprint June 4th, 5th, and half-day on June 6th in Slough, UK. Fun and good times ensued while accomplishing a lot.

The OpenROAD Enhancement queue was thoroughly reviewed looking for potential projects that could completed in two days. Joe, being his usually overly optimistic and enthusiastic self, selected way more projects for consideration than were doable. The enthusiasm from the team that gathers for the Sprint is admirable as they start early and work late to maximize their time together.

An incredible amount was accomplished at the Sprint.

4GL projects implemented were:

• Validate inputs to check for empty database name before connecting to new database in Query tab.
• Change BgColor of ‘Database’ and ‘Table or View’ entry fields in the dialog titled ‘Select a Database Table’ from gray to white to indicate that you can type into these fields.
• Implement sorting by clicking on a ‘Table Selection:’ frame’s header column to order the rows in the display table. Allow the user to sort to two levels of ordering.
• Enclose literal strings in quotes when assigning new values in the debugger.
• Implement an 'always on top' option for the property inspector.
• Create a new application or component when right clicking in the applications or components pane. Currently the option 'new' is not available on the context sensitive menus opened by right mouse click.
• When on the components pane, click on the 'new' button, a popup for creating a new application gets opened instead of a popup to create a new component. Either the 'new' button should be dimmed, when the components pane is activated or when clicking the 'new' button you should get a list of possible components to create. The solution implemented was the ’new’ button in the tool bar is dimmed if the component frame is activated. This will prevent the user from choosing the ‘new’ button expecting to create a new component and being presented with the new application dialog instead. Instead of only adding the ‘new’ menu item to the context sensitive menus for the application and components pane, we filled out the context sensitive menus with all the corresponding toolbar items which made sense for the particular menu.
• While transferring components between machines, Kim almost overwrote a component by accident using the export dialog. This occurred because the screen layout led him to enter in a filename first before changing the export format type. This filename entryfield was not big enough for him to see that file extension had changed. We decided to take the time to fix these problems by changing the screen layout so you would change the file type first before entering the filename. The filename field was enlarged to allow most files names including the full path to be seen. We made the changes in such a way that all similar type dialogs benefited.
• Suppress the display of “application name!” in front of the defined attributes and methods in the class window when one class inherits from another.

3GL Projects worked on but incomplete were:

• Provide the developer with a list of running FrameExecs.
• Provide a way to break out of tight loops in the 4gl by allowing to break the flow of 4gl instructions and stopping at that point in the debugger.
• Fix the runtime so that two levels of property options menu work properly on portlets.

Large projects that were continued at the Sprint were:

• Provide developers with an intellisense editor.
• Upgrade an ABF application to OpenROAD and allow some of the frames to be rendered in HTML using HTML5 communicating directly with the business logic in the OpenROAD Server.

Some other projects, beyond the scope, could only be dreamed about were:

• Allow the developer to view a single script that can be view as a processed script, a field script, or as a mixture of scripts without the need to pick on style over another.
• True multi dimensional arrays ( Filling contiguous block of memory).

Even though the Sprint was officially over, Joe faced with a 3hr flight delay and 10hr flight home sitting in a seat with a broken movie screen, implemented one more project. Details below:

• Add the current selected application name next to Components (on top of the component panel). Currently, the behavior is Component(s) of <appName>. This feature is still not quite complete as he would like to also change the applications pane title to Application(s) of <database>.

Now back to the real world where the projects all need to be written up on the OpenROAD project page and those that are complete need to be submitted into the development codeline if not done so already. The features discussed above that are fully implemented will be scheduled in the OpenROAD 6.2 release. For those projects for which a project page exists, I’ve linked the aforementioned projects to the project page. As the project pages are completed, I’ll revisit this article and update with the remaining links.

Congratulations to all the participants for a job well done!!! It is clear from all that was accomplished that many hours were spent implementing the completed projects and making a good start on the other projects. Based on feedback, I know everyone is already looking forward to the next Sprint.