OpenEdge Application Development Platform

A Complete, Modern, Future-proof Application Development Platform

OpenEdge® is the complete application development platform to build dynamic, business process-enabled applications for secure deployment across any platform, any mobile device, and any Cloud.

At Progress Software, we have always prided ourselves on our ability to simplify the job of creating and operating the world’s best business applications. The Progress OpenEdge platform offers a complete, out-of-the-box solution for developing, integrating, and managing business applications offered in the Cloud.

OpenEdge is designed to assist software developers and partners to become more operationally responsive to market and customer needs now and in the future. With OpenEdge, service and application development is agile and cost-effective, and the ensuing applications are reliable, easy to maintain, cost effective, and service-enabled. As a result, companies and partners are able to capitalize on new opportunities by getting competitive applications to market more quickly.

With SaaS being a key market driver for OpenEdge 11, several characteristics have been identified as being critical to achieving technological success with Cloud-based applications. These “Keys to Success” are:

Mobility
Multi-Tenancy
User Interface Flexibility
Operational Excellence
Productivity
Security & Compliance
Integration
Personalization

With OpenEdge 11, there are significant new capabilities within each of these “keys to success” categories that enable our customers and partners to deliver Responsive Business Applications (RBA) in the Cloud.

Mobile Apps

The addition of OpenEdge Mobile provides an integrated, “everything-in-the-box” mobile UI development platform, it’s never been easier to create new mobile apps or extend your existing OpenEdge application to support mobile users. The new Mobile App Builder and visual designer provides the capability to produce feature-rich mobile apps for the iOS and Android platforms using a “write once, run anywhere” approach. Try the OpenEdge Mobile Quick Start and see how fast and simple it is to create a mobile app in our cloud Showroom or on-premise.

Multi-Tenancy: Multi-tenant Tables

A multi-tenant database is one which provides database support to a number of separate and distinct groups of users, also referred to as tenants. Multi-tenant applications have taken an increasing foothold in the database marketplace largely due to the emergence of SaaS as a deployment strategy. For the SaaS application provider, a multi-tenant deployment strategy provides many benefits, especially when a Shared Tenancy approach is used. Management of the deployment can take place either at the overall application or database level, or based on tenant and user. Operational complexity is greatly reduced due to the number of shared resources and because only one instance of the application and database is involved. With OpenEdge 11, developing and deploying multi-tenant applications is transformed by using an approach that is unique in the industry, reducing and even eliminating the challenges typically presented when implementing a Shared Tenancy application. This is due to two major factors:

Tenant support is implemented in the database layer
Database utilities and tools are also tenant-aware.

The significant advantage of the first point is that the application no longer has to manage tenancy - simplifying the code and making tenancy completely transparent. For the second point, the operational aspects of the database are also capable of acting in a mode that is either tenant-specific or database-specific. This streamlines key functions such as index maintenance, data dump and load, object moves, and other database functions.

User Interface Flexibility: Enhanced Rich Internet Application (RIA) Support

Today, the market demand is high for web applications that have many of the qualities and characteristics of desktop applications but are delivered over the web. RIAs combine the flexibility, responsiveness, and ease of use of desktop applications with the broad reach of the web. RIAs provide a dynamic web experience that is rich and engaging, as well as interactive. RIA technologies provide a variety of development, deployment, and runtime options for SaaS-based applications.

Due to the flexibility of the platform, OpenEdge already supports many different RIA technologies. Since no RIA technology has taken the lead, OpenEdge 11 provides support for many additional options, more specifically:

JSON parser support in the ABL
Updated Infragistics controls (GUI for .NET)
Architect support for custom project types (Ajax/WebSpeed)

Operational Excellence: Performance and Reliability Improvements

OpenEdge 11 continues to focus on supporting the development of high-performance and ultra-reliable applications to support the needs of 24x7 business operations with ever-increasing numbers of users. Across the board - the AppServer, the database, the DataServers, and more - critical performance enhancements have been made to ensure that your application match aggressive business demands. Diagnostic and monitoring tools have been improved and enhanced to provide a more proactive environment for troubleshooting issues. Additionally, special considerations have been made to facilitate deployments to the Cloud where performance and reliability are paramount.

While some of the key new features have been discussed, there is an extensive list of additional enhancements within OpenEdge 11. Read the datasheet.