ODB-II offers graphical development tools which greatly reduce the development time of applications. The following tools are available to the users of ODB-II:
Database designers need tools for designing, implementing and maintaining database schemas. ODB-II offers ModelWorks, which is a visual tool for modeling and schema design. It provides users with a Motif interface.
ModelWorks allows dynamic retrieval and update of data or schema in a graphical, card or table format; therefore users do not have to know the language details.
Application developers need tools that allow rapid prototyping, as well as more traditional phased approaches. Very often, applications will be developed with a client-server architecture, using a Windows PC as the client platform and a UNIX host as the server.
The diagram above shows how the various software components relate to each other. The elements with names in bold are the elements provided in the ODB-II software pack. RODQL (Remote ODQL) is the communications infrastructure that enables PC client applications to connect to ODB-II on the UNIX server. It provides a direct programming interface allowing an application to connect to a server, issue ODQL requests, and process the results. Any programming languages such as C and C++ can be used to write applications using this API. Many Windows applications need to manipulate multimedia objects held in the ODB-II database, and the MEDIA.DLL library is provided for this purpose. It provides functions that allow direct copying of media objects between the ODB-II database and the PC filestore or memory.
The ODB-II VBX provides a higher-level interface for Visual Basic developers. It has two parts: a set of routines that can be called directly from Visual Basic applications, and a set of custom controls. There are three controls, one to establish a session connection, one to control navigation, and one to link specific fields on the Visual Basic form to specific properties in the ODB-II database. This allows simple applications to be written with minimal programming. The PC Toolkit is a collection of useful applications running under Windows. In particular it includes:
A Class Browser, which allows you to inspect details of ODB-II classes and methods from the PC
A Class Builder, which allows you to define new ODB-II classes. It is particularly intended for constructing classes that represent multimedia formats encountered on the PC, for example .WAV or .MID files.
The ODBC driver is provided to enable ODBC-enabled Windows applications, such as the Excel spreadsheet, to access ODB-II data without explicit coding. ODBC is an SQL-based standard defined by Microsoft. The driver provides a relational view of the data in the ODB-II database. Although this does not allow the full object features of ODB-II to be exploited, it does greatly increase the accessibility of ODB-II data because there are many applications available that use ODBC.
Leading Edge Features of ODB-II
Object Database Query Language
Current Implementations of ODB-II