Revelation Roadshow Down Under 2008 - Wrap-up
By David Goddard
Due to overwhelming demand, Revelation University was held at two locations in 2008, in Sydney on Tuesday October 14th and in Auckland on Friday 17th October. Over 50 attendees from the Asia Pacific region participated in a day chock full of Revelation technical know-how punctuated with product suggestions, the odd joke or two and peer-to-peer networking.
The day began at 8:30 A.M. with registration and coffee, giving attendees an opportunity to catch up with old friends and exchange news from their parts of the world. Mike Ruane, President and CEO of Revelation Software, then kicked off the proceedings with a short “State of the Company” presentation highlighting what Revelation Software had been up to since the REVU 2007 and where they were heading in 2009 and beyond.
Having more to show than time would allow, Mike then jumped straight into demonstrating the new features in the soon to be released OpenInsight v9.0. And believe me, there was plenty to show, with over 4000 new or updated components to be rolled out in the next release.
Mike started with the Table Builder, moving on to the Database Manager and Report Builder, all of which included many new features and enhancements. One of the favorite enhancements included the ability to add a default gradient background to all OpenInsight windows with only a few clicks of the mouse, giving any application an instant face lift.
A short break for morning tea was followed by Mike continuing with the new OpenInsight Printer Interface (OIPI), updates to the Form Designer and even a quick demo integrating Google API’s like chart and maps into an OpenInsight form. The extension of the style settings for the EDITTABLE control, allowing for virtually limitless combinations, was of particular interest.
Attendees then broke for lunch and a quick stretch of the legs, before reassembling for a quick “how to” session on the new Universal Driver v4.5 and Universal Driver Heavy v4.5 by David Goddard. Installation and configuration settings were covered.
This was followed by Mike who previewed the new features in the Runtime Deployment Kit (RDK) including the ability to automatically create a SETUP.EXE using the integrated NSIS installer.
A final short break for afternoon tea was followed by Mike demonstrating the WEBOI tools built into OpenInsight v9.0. WEBOI interrogates existing OpenInsight components and data and ties it into the Web. Attendees were amazed how WEBOI could reuse their existing application components, like Windows, Popups and stored procedures, unchanged, via a web browser allowing for maximum re-use and integration with minimum effort and cost. This lead to questions like “could I host the application for my client(s), like a cloud computing environment?” which of course, the answer is yes!
Not only is Revelation University an accelerated learning event for the attendees, it’s also a research event for Revelation Software. Mike is always keen to hear how developers are using OpenInsight and what ideas and suggestions they have to enhance or extend the product. In total, there were forty four (44) suggestions from attendees at REVU08, five (5) of which were incorporated into the OpenInsight v9.0 beta3 between Sydney and Auckland. This raises the question “do Asia/Pacific Revelation developers suggest the best OI enhancements?”. I may be biased, but I think they do! Maybe we should plot suggestions on Google Maps to find out?
Thanks to the “Class of 2008” for making REVU08 a great success, some of whom travelled great distances to attend. Revelation knows that it can be hard to set aside a whole day to attend events like this. That’s why we try our hardest to offer you the biggest bang for your buck.
We would like to thank Mike and Nancy Ruane for travelling half way around the world to present at REVU08 and Richard Bright, the Revelation distributor for New Zealand, for his tireless work in arranging the Auckland leg of REVU08.
See you at REVU09