ODRA (Object Database for Rapid Application development) is an object-oriented application development environment currently being constructed at the Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology. The aim of the project is to design a next-generation development tool for future database application programmers. The tool is based on the query language SBQL (Stack-Based Query Language), a new, powerful and high level object-oriented programming language tightly coupled with query capabilities. The SBQL execution environment consists of a virtual machine, a main memory DBMS and an infrastructure supporting distributed computing. The paper presents design goals of ODRA, its fundamental mechanisms and some relationships with other solutions.