Newsletter Archive - October 2010
Table of Contents
- Welcome, from Knowledge Services Director Don Fournier
- New Course Available: DataXtend SI Overview, by Lauren Slater
- New Course Available: Progress Sonic ESB System Management, by Kashif Khan
- New Course Available: Managing Business Visibility with Actional, by Utsav Banerjee
- Updated Courseware: Database Administration, by Barbara Shannon
- New Video Series Provides OpenEdge 10 Getting Started Material, by John Sadd
Welcome from Don Fournier, Director of Knowledge Services
As we enter year’s end with all of its worldwide variations in seasons and weather, we, too, in Progress Knowledge Services are offering up a substantial plate of varied courseware updates.
First, Lauren Slater, a Principal Course Developer, introduces you to her updated DXSI Overview course. Now reflecting DXSI 8.4.2 features and functionality, this two-day course is available as both Instructor-led Training (ILT) and Web-based Training (WBT). See Lauren’s article for a reminder about the key values of the DXSI product and a tabular presentation of course content.
Next, Kashif Khan, a Principal Instructional Designer, provides an overview of the Sonic ESB System Management course, updated to support Sonic 8.0. If you are a Sonic ESB administrator, you will want to review Kashif’s summary of this important course, also offered as both ILT and WBT.
Utsav Banerjee, a Senior Instructional Designer, next weighs in with a description of the revised course, Managing Business Visibility with Actional. This course now undergirds the Actional 8.1 release. You can take it as ILT or WBT. Utsav tells you what you’ll find across the course’s nine lessons.
Barbara Shannon, Principal Technical Writer, provides brief articles about updates to two key related OpenEdge courses, Database Administration and Advanced Database Administration. These courses are now current to the OE 10.2B release. See Barbara’s summaries about the purpose of each course, key audiences and learning objectives, and what’s covered in them.
Finally, John Sadd, a Progress Fellow, continues his marvelous work of extending the OpenEdge Getting Started video collection posted on Progress Communities. John has developed two new series, one supporting classes and object-oriented programming (OOP) in the Advanced Business Language (ABL), and the other addressing Rich Internet Applications (RIA). John provides a great deal of valuable information in his more extensive article. These brief but cogent videos are getting lots of attention in the OE development community. Customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. See if these videos can also help you.
Let me remind all of you, our valued customers, that the Progress eLearning Community (PEC) is an invaluable vehicle for taking high-quality, highly-interactive, award-winning, self-paced , Web-based training. Those of you who are decision-makers can avail yourselves of a low-cost, highly-scalable education solution for your group’s needs by subscribing to the PEC. Just ask your PSC Customer Services representative how to get access, and let us know what you think.
I wish you all a successful end to your calendar and/or fiscal year!
- Don Fournier
New Course Available: DataXtend SI Overview
By Lauren Slater
Many organizations are adopting service-oriented architecture (SOA) to integrate software applications because SOA provides a loosely coupled, standards-based architecture, which lets different applications interact with each other—without having to rely on a specific software platform or language.
Each software system, however, has its own way of representing data. Identifying and maintaining semantic mapping between systems can require tremendous effort. Even in SOA environments, mapping and validating data between applications is still largely done using custom code and Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT), which is often complex. These result in tightly coupled, point-to-point data integration, even when the business logic is loosely coupled. So, one of the most expensive and complex challenges of integrating business applications is ensuring the validity of data exchanged between applications.
This is where ® DataXtend™ Semantic Integrator™ (SI) helps. DataXtend SI uses common model integration to relate applications that interact with each other. With this approach to data integration, all systems map to a single data model instead of directly to each other. DataXtend SI addresses semantic data integration by letting you specify rules based on the meaning of data and your business requirements.
Course content
The course DataXtend SI Overview provides a high-level description of DataXtend SI features and tools you use to create, maintain, and govern common-model data services for providing loosely coupled SOA data integration. Its exercises let you practice implementing and testing a sample data-integration project.
This course has the following lessons:
| Lesson | Title | What it covers |
| 1 | Introducing DataXtend SI | Introduces common model integration, the sample project used in the labs, and features and architecture of DataXtend SI. |
| 2 | Using DataXtend SI Workbench | Working with projects, DataXtend SI views, exporting a project, navigating and searching an exchange model. |
| 3 | Working with Data Models | Describing the structure of a data model. Importing schemas from different sources. Exporting schemas. |
| 4 | Mapping and Transforming Data | Patterns for mapping attributes, classes, and collections. Defining submaps. Working through the mapping process. |
| 5 | Defining Expressions | Introduces the Expression Editor. Defining source expressions. Defining computed attributes. |
| 6 | Defining and Testing Semantics | Defining preconditions for conditional map execution. Defining validation rules. Enriching the common model. Developing tests and test cases. |
| 7 | Managing Change | Analyzing the impact of changes to an exchange model. Comparing elements and projects. Synchronizing projects. |
| 8 | Configuring, Packaging, and Deploying Data Services | Configuring runtime behavior and data source locations. Generating code. Packaging and deploying data services. |
Intended audience
This course is for Enterprise Architects, Data Architects, and Data Analysts who develop and manage enterprise data architecture.
Course delivery formats
The Progress eLearning Community offers this course in the following formats:
- Web-based training. Subscribe
- Instructor-led training. Register
The 2-day instructor-led training is conducted at your location by a Progress Software Corporation consultant.
Lauren Slater is a Principal Course Developer and Instructor with Progress Software Corporation
New Course Available: Progress Sonic ESB System Management
By Kashif Khan
The task of managing a Sonic Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) application spans across two distinct Sonic environments:
- The ESB application development environment where developers build ESB applications
- The message queue (MQ) environment where SonicMQ administrators configure and deploy messaging brokers and containers
ESB administrators are responsible for extracting existing ESB applications from one environment and deploying them in distributed, secure, scalable, and highly available Sonic ESB systems in another environment.
Once an ESB application is successfully deployed in the target deployment domain, ESB administrators are responsible for managing the ESB application. ESB administrators also ensure that all ESB containers and services are working and that there are no constraints or errors in the application. Other important responsibilities of ESB administrators are to tune ESB components for optimal performance and to ensure that the components are deployed appropriately in the deployment domain.
An ESB administrator also troubleshoots after an ESB application has been deployed.
Course overview
The Progress Sonic ESB System Management course aims to fulfill the long-standing requirement for courses that cover the various activities of an ESB administrator. This course covers the various concepts, tasks, tools, and best practices used by ESB administrators to manage, monitor, and tune deployed ESB applications.
The course has four lessons that cover the following areas:
| Lesson | Title | What it covers |
| 1 | Introduction to Sonic ESB Management | Overview of the role of an ESB administrator and the tools used by an ESB administrator. |
| 2 | Managing ESB applications | The various management tasks that an ESB administrator performs. |
| 3 | Monitoring ESB applications | Monitoring ESB applications using service metrics, notifications, and container logs. |
| 4 | Tuning ESB applications | Overview of the performance tuning process and using Sonic TestHarness to conduct a performance test. The lesson also covers how to tune different components to improve application’s performance. |
Intended audience
The Progress Sonic ESB System Management course is built on Sonic 8.0 and is primarily designed for ESB administrators who are responsible for managing, monitoring, and tuning ESB applications deployed in the integration, testing, or production environments.
To know more about deploying ESB applications, you can take the Progress Sonic ESB System Deployment course.
Course delivery format
The Progress eLearning Community offers this course in the following formats:
- Web-based training
- Instructor-led training
The 1-day instructor-led training is conducted at your location by a Progress Software Corporation consultant.
Kashif Kahn is a Principal Instructional Designer with Progress Software Corporation
New Course Available: Managing Business Visibility with Actional
By Utsav Banerjee
Today, enterprise service networks involve a multitude of heterogeneous systems and span across large enterprises, encompassing physical and logical boundaries. To gain business visibility of their networks, enterprises need a way to measure how various factors, such as heterogeneity of systems and geographical diversity, impact their business. However, it is difficult for IT departments to collect the right metrics with the tools commonly available to them, and the metrics they collect do not necessarily relate to business processes and business requirements.
Actional has the tools to gather metrics and to look at systems from a business perspective. It can automatically discover an enterprise’s end-to-end business process and map that business process to the enterprise’s IT infrastructure. The ability to automatically tie a business process to IT infrastructure without having to model the business process, or map it with tools, is a key value that Actional offers.
Course overview
The Managing Business Visibility with Actional course aims to guide the System Administrator who requires Actional to closely monitor service activity in SOA environments and assess the performance of key business processes. This course covers various concepts, tasks, tools, and best practices the System Administrator can use to gain visibility into business processes running in a service network.
The course has nine lessons.
| Lesson | Title | What it covers |
| 1 | Understanding How to Manage Business Visibility with Actional | Overview of SOA management challenges and benefits of Actional in managing a SOA |
| 2 | Using Message Fields and Flow Fields | Introduction to message fields and flow fields and how they can be used to extract meaningful business information from the content of service messages |
| 3 | Using Dimensions | Introduction to Dimensions and how they can be used in categorizing business data captured from service messages |
| 4 | Introduction to Business Processes | Overview of the business process feature in Actional and how it can be used to capture service usage statistics specific to a business process |
| 5 | Monitoring Elapsed Time and States in a Business Process | How to monitor elapsed time and states in a business process |
| 6 | Customizing Views for a Business Process | How to create customized metrics and portal views based on stakeholder needs |
| 7 | Using Stabilizers | Introduction to Stabilizers and how they can be used to regulate policy evaluation at runtime |
| 8 | Using Key Business Indicators | Overview of Key Business Indicators and their use in measuring the performance of a business |
| 9 | Reconnecting Flows | Introduction to the Reconnecting Flows feature and how it is used to establish broken flows of a business process that span across multiple managed and unmanaged nodes |
Intended audience
The Managing Business Visibility with Actional course is built on Actional 8.1 and is primarily designed for system administrators responsible for monitoring activity in a service network and providing metrics needed to assess business performance.
Course delivery format
The Progress eLearning Community offers this course in the following formats:
- Web-based training
- Instructor-led training
The 2-day instructor-led training is conducted at your location by a Progress Software Corporation consultant.
Utsav Banerjee is a Senior Instructional Designer with Progress Software Corporation
Updated Courseware: Database Administration
By Barbara Shannon
The Database Administration course material has been updated for OpenEdge 10.2B. Intended primarily for new database administrators who need to learn basic database administration tasks, this course guides learners through the concepts, procedures, and guidelines used in administering OpenEdge RDBMS 10 databases.
In this course, you do the following:
- Examine the OpenEdge RDBMS architecture
- Familiarize yourself with database administration tools
- Learn how to create a database
- Learn how to start up and shut down a database
- Learn how to back up and restore a database
- Learn how to implement roll-forward recovery using after-imaging
- Learn how to dump and load a database
- Learn how to troubleshoot database problems
The modules in this course include the following lessons and appendices:
| Lesson | Title | What it covers |
| 1 | Overview of OpenEdge RDBMS Architecture | Describes the components and functionality of OpenEdge RDBMS architecture such as disk-resident database, shared memory, brokers, servers, clients, and background processes |
| 2 | Database Administration Tools | Describes the features and functionality of the Proenv, Data Dictionary, and Data Administration tools |
| 3 | Creating a Database | Describes the methods and procedures for creating databases from scratch or from other databases |
| 4 | Starting Up and Shutting Down a Database | Describes the methods and procedures for starting up and shutting down databases using Proenv and Progress Explorer |
| 5 | Backing Up and Restoring a Database | Describes how to backup databases and restore them from database backups |
| 6 | Implementing Roll-Forward Recovery Using After-Imaging | Describes how to implement roll-forward recovery using database backups and after-imaging files |
| 7 | Dumping and Loading a Database | Describes how to dump data definitions and table contents from a source database and load them into a target database |
| 8 | Troubleshooting Database Problems | Describes how to solve database problems such as failed crash recovery, failed database start up, and damaged database structure file |
| A | Using Two-phase Commit | Describes how two-phase commit ensures that transactions are handled correctly across multiple databases in a distributed environment |
| B | Connecting to a Database using OpenEdge ABL | Describes how to connect to and disconnect from databases using OpenEdge ABL |
| C | Overview of OpenEdge Management and OpenEdge Replication | Describes the features and benefits of OpenEdge Management and OpenEdge Replication |
| D | Overview of OpenEdge Auditing and Transparent Data Encryption | Describes the features of these two security-related pieces of functionality |
| E | Job Aids | Presents Job Aids from all lessons for easy access on the job |
Updated Courseware: Advanced Database Administration
The Advanced Database Administration course material has been updated for OpenEdge 10.2B. This course is designed for database administrators who have mastered the fundamentals of administering OpenEdge RDBMS 10 databases. In this course, you learn about the advanced concepts and techniques used in administering OpenEdge RDBMS 10 databases.
You learn how to:
- Size your existing databases for efficient storage and optimal performance
- Implement effective database migration strategies
- Perform specialized dump and load
- Fix database corruption
- Fix index corruption
- Use Virtual System Tables
- Understand Shared Memory
- Understand OpenEdge Auditing
- Understand Transparent Data Encryption
- Handle other advanced database administration tasks
The modules in this course include the following lessons and appendices:
| Lesson | Title | What it covers |
| 1 | Sizing a Database | How to size the application data storage areas, the BI storage area, and the AI storage areas of a database. |
| 2 | Migrating a Database | Why, when, and how to implement different database migration strategies. |
| 3 | Specialized Dump and Load | How to dump and load a very large database quickly and efficiently. |
| 4 | Fixing Database Corruption | How to fix different types of database corruption. |
| 5 | Fixing Index Corruption | How to fix different types of index corruption. |
| 6 | Using Virtual System Tables | How to use Virtual System Tables to monitor a running database. |
| 7 | Shared Memory | How shared memory is allocated and how to manage it. |
| 8 | OpenEdge Auditing | How to enable your database for OpenEdge Auditing, and how to configure and manage an audited database. |
| 9 | OpenEdge Transparent Data Encryption | How to enable your database for Transparent Data Encryption and how to configure and manage an encrypted database. |
| 10 | Additional Advanced DBA Topics | How to manage databases in a clustered environment. How to work with very large databases. How to troubleshoot hung OpenEdge RDBMS ports and hung shared memory segments. |
| A | Understanding Block Allocation | How OpenEdge RDBMS allocates database blocks, record blocks, and index blocks, and how data manipulation activities affect these allocations. |
| B | Job Aids | Presents Job Aids from all lessons for easy access on the job. |
Barbara Shannon is a Principal Technical Writer with Progress Software Corporation
New Video Series Provides OpenEdge 10 Getting Started Material
By John Sadd
Over the past year, a number of short videos on many topics relating to the features of OpenEdge 10 have been posted on the Progress Communities website. You can access the videos from the OpenEdge area of the Progress Software Developers' Network (PSDN) Community:
Two new series of videos have been added.
The first series is an introduction to the support for classes and object-oriented programming in Advanced Business Language (ABL). This seven-part series is designed for OpenEdge developers who may be new to object-oriented (OO) programming, and need an introduction to OO programming concepts that talk of the practical benefits of OO programming and its use in OpenEdge applications, rather than OO programming in general. It covers the basic class syntax, including methods and properties; compiler support for strong typing of objects; the use of interfaces as a programming contract; inheritance as a mechanism for reuse and standardization of code; method overloading; and the lifecycle of objects as instances of classes you define. Many aspects of OpenEdge Architect support for classes are covered.
The second series covers the foundations for building Rich Internet Applications (RIA) using OpenEdge to support your data management and business logic, combined with one of the many client-side toolkits, frameworks, and plug-ins available–as well as the OpenEdge GUI for .NET support–to design and build a flexible user interface. Your options include using a zero-footprint, browser-based UI, if that is what your application requires. The series reviews some of the alternatives for defining access to your ABL business logic, using OpenEdge AppServer, WebSpeed, or Web services, as well as OpenEdge Architect support for these technologies in OpenEdge 10.2B. It concludes with a simple example of a user interface coded with the ExtJS control library, which retrieves data from an OpenEdge procedure via WebSpeed.
Over time, additional videos in this series will cover other libraries and frameworks, plus plug-ins such as Microsoft Silverlight, along with more information on using the OpenEdge GUI for .NET as a rich desktop interface solution.
For those of you not already familiar with them, two series of videos on OpenEdge Architect are also posted in the same area. Architect is the complete Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for OpenEdge application development first introduced in OpenEdge Release 10.1. Using OpenEdge Architect, you can migrate and maintain existing applications, including applications first developed in OpenEdge Studio; create and maintain new ABL applications; test and debug your application code; and create new user interface forms using the OpenEdge GUI for .NET support and Architect’s Visual Designer tool. Architect is built on the industry-standard Eclipse platform, and includes a host of features and options that will reward your investment in learning the ins and outs of this comprehensive toolset. The videos are designed to help you with the first steps in that self-education process.
The Architect videos are organized into two groups. The Getting Started collection includes five sessions to get you started with OpenEdge Architect if you haven’t used the product before. Its topics include the following:
- Setting up your first Architect workspace and project
- Defining workspace database connections
- Setting properties for your project
- Building and running your project
- An introduction to the Architect ABL Editor
This set of five sessions will get you up and running, so that you can bring your own application code into Architect and begin to understand how to organize it into projects, how to apply a few of the most important settings to specify your preferences and application environment requirements, and how to start to take advantage of the many advanced features that Architect provides in the ABL code Editor.
The second group, called the Using the Architect Collection, currently contains more than a dozen videos sessions for these areas:
- Using and customizing perspectives and views
- Migrating and maintaining procedures built in OpenEdge Studio tools such as the AppBuilder
- Using the Architect ABL Editor
- Using the Architect ABL Debugger
- General interest topics such as the Quick Access feature
- Support for ABL classes in Architect
In addition, there is a series of videos and accompanying white papers on Using Visual Designer and GUI for .NET in OpenEdge Architect. More than a dozen video sessions cover topics related to the Visual Designer tool in Architect, and the latest OpenEdge support for building ABL applications with modern and feature-rich user interfaces that use .NET controls. This series also touches on a number of language enhancements in ABL to support development in classes, as well as how to use Architect support for creating new class files, forms, interfaces, and other source code elements of a class-based application, all of which can be fully integrated with existing ABL procedural application components.
The videos are organized into two groups. The first, titled Introducing Visual Designer and GUI for .NET, provides Getting Started material on using Visual Designer to create new user interfaces built with .NET controls, as well as the basic features of OpenEdge GUI for .NET support. The material covers creating and using a ProBindingSource, attaching a ProBindingSource to a .NET grid control, building an Inherited Control and a User Control as specializations of built-in controls, creating your own Custom Controls group for use in Visual Designer, and subscribing to .NET events.
The second group is titled Using the OpenEdge ProBindingSource. The ProBindingSource is an OpenEdge-specific .NET control that serves as a DataSource for any .NET user interface control that displays data, from Microsoft, Infragistics, or other third-party vendors. At the same time it connects to any query, ProDataSet, or temp-table in your ABL application code to help manage your data and coordinate data display and update with the user interface. These sessions go beyond the Introducing Visual Designer series to examine the use of all of the most important ProBindingSource properties, events, and methods, which support reading, sorting, and batching data from a data source, as well as all update operations.
The material includes a video showing ways to create a ProBindingSource directly from an ABL source file that contains a temp-table, ProDataSet, or XSD data definition, as well as from your database schema. There is also a multi-part series on sorting data that shows how the ProBindingSource helps you manage data sorting, and how the Microsoft grid and Infragistics UltraGrid controls differ in how they coordinate with the ProBindingSource to manage sorting.
Each video is brief– typically seven to ten minutes–and focuses on a topic so that you can learn enough to try out what you’ve seen with your own application code. The videos don’t constitute a tutorial as such, so you can view them in any order that’s appropriate to you, depending on what you already know about the product area being addressed. That said, some of the videos work as a series to explore a larger topic, and some make use of application components built and explained in earlier videos. The overview pages that link to all the videos in a series on PSDN make it clear what order you should go through them if you want to see all the available material.
In addition, many of the videos also have an accompanying document that provides a written version of the material, allowing you to examine the steps shown in the video and any code samples in detail.
There is no larger exercise or sample code base that you have to download and work with. Once you have seen what a video covers, you can take its knowledge back to apply it to your own application.
The videos are complementary to other materials you can access through the Evaluation Center link on the same OpenEdge product page, including the OpenEdge Tour, a series of high-level video presentations introducing the major feature areas of OpenEdge 10, including Architect; and the Architect Tutorial, a hands-on step-by-step tour of the Architect development environment using a sample application. Detailed documentation is available in the Architect Online Help, and in the manual OpenEdge Development: GUI for .NET Programming, part of the OpenEdge 10.2B product documentation; and in various recorded webinars available through the Developers Corner link, all accessible from the OpenEdge Product home page on PSDN.
John Sadd is a Progress Engineering Fellow and OpenEdge Evangelist at Progress Software Corporation
Progress, Actional, Apama, AppBuilder, AppServer, DataXtend, FUSE, WebClient, Progress Dynamics, SmartObject, OpenEdge, Sonic, SonicMQ, Sonic ESB, Sonic Orchestration Server, ProDataSets, and WebSpeed are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation or one it its subsidiaries or affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Java and all Java based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Any other trademarks or service marks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.
Copyright © 2010 Progress Software Corporation. All rights reserved.
