Thank you to everyone that has contacted me recently about the Revelation offer of Free OI WORKS for a year and especially to those of you that have taken up the offer. There are a few common questions being asked, and I thought that I would answer
those here for everyone who is still wondering but afraid to ask. I’ll try to keep this as short as possible, but please contact me (martyn@<removethisbit> revsoft.co.uk) should you have any further questions or wish to take advantage of this offer.

Many thanks,
Martyn.

1) What does OI WORKS provide me with?
In short, everything that you are likely to need to build your MV applications in OI. The ENTIRE OpenInsight 10.1 rapid application development suite for building desktop and web based applications, all upgrades for 12 months for your development system
AND your deployed systems (see 3 below), support for 12 months, access to the e-learning course (desktop only at the moment), access to the OpenInsight WORKS discussion forum.

2) Which flavours of database do you support?
Currently D3, U2 and QM, also Couchbase and SQL. Using the MV Data connector, we believe that other MV databases (mvBase for example) should be supportable, it is just that we have not yet had anyone ask about supporting other MV databases.

3) Why are you not forcing demos and tuition?
We wanted to make the development tools available to the MV community in a way that they wanted and this usually meant no mandatory time online with one of us explaining things that you don’t need or care about. Of course, I intend to stay in touch
during the early days but, through OI WORKS, you have access to all of our team for any support and other help that you might need ‘when’ you need it.

4) Can I deploy my developed applications?
OpenInsight 10.1 includes a build in Runtime Deployment Kit for deploying applications, so yes. However, deployed systems require a separate Network User License which needs to be purchased separately. Sorry, not everything is free.

5) Can I realistically build my solution in the first year?
A lot will depend on the size of your application and the time that you take to get up to speed and the time needed to build the interface. That said, whilst learning how to use OpenInsight I created a complete CRM package (from scratch) for RevUK in
well under a year and I have built several smaller systems in just a few days or weeks. We are therefore confident that most developers will have a deliverable system within 12 months. The whole idea of the 12 month free OI WORKS, is to enable
developers to get a paying product to market before having to invest in OpenInsight.

6) What happens at the end of the first year?
Hopefully you will have a paying solution and you will wish to join the WORKS subscription program at the usual cost, or you can simply walk away and the software will simply stop working on the license expiry date. No strings, no obligation.

7) What is the catch?
Other than we want you to be successful and join WORKS in 12 months’ time, there really is no catch.

8) Code, Low Code, No Code, just how code heavy is OpenInsight?
Another difficult question because it depends on your application. OpenInsight builds on decades of experience providing intuitive, powerful, 4GL development tools. Of course, as the mainstream market did not provide true 4GLs they redefined 4GL to mean
the products they provided which were not 4GLs. So you could, in theory, deliver an entire application without cutting a single line of code. That said, OpenInsight features lots of QuickEvents which are premade building blocks which you simply call
throughout the system. Basic functions such as saving records, deleting records, browsing record etc require no code at all. QuickEvents provide more complex processing for the more common day to day tasks. In addition, every system object exposes a
large amount of properties that are set by simply making selections in the IDE, again reducing the code needed. Where you wish to do something in code, you can utilise the BASIC+ language to write small, medium, large, gigantic programs (you get the
idea).
The development tools also feature a very powerful debugger for debugging BASIC+ code.

Using QuickEvents and setting Properties, I found myself removing 1,000’s of lines of legacy code that I had written in some of my applications. As well as having less code to write and maintain, as a junior developer, I am now using professionally
written code, so my applications are faster and more robust.

In short, yes you are likely to be writing and maintain code but I’d call OpenInsight a low code development environment with the ability to code to your hearts content where required. The bonus of you, is that we do not lock you into our code, you
have control at all times.

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