Modern ABL Development for Today's OpenEdge Applications

Modernizing OpenEdge applications requires more than adopting new technologies. It requires organizations to rethink how applications are designed, developed, tested, deployed and maintained throughout the software lifecycle.

That was the focus of our recent webinar, Modern ABL Development for Today's OpenEdge Applications, featuring insights from the OpenEdge professional services, product and engineering team: Tony Prettyman, Roland de Pijper, Cameron Wright, Steve Southwell and Edsel Garcia. Together, they shared practical strategies for helping development teams modernize applications while improving developer productivity, application performance and code quality.

The session explored seven key areas of modern OpenEdge development:

1. ABL AI-assisted development and modern IDEs
2. Horizontal scaling
3. Query structure and optimization
4. Unit testing and shift-left development
5. Code quality, security and development standards
6. DevOps, CI/CD and automation
7. Memory profiling and memory management

ABL AI-Assisted Development and Modern IDEs

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how software is developed, but OpenEdge developers face a unique challenge. Most large language models have been trained on languages such as Java, Python and C#, with relatively little exposure to ABL.

To address this gap, Progress introduced the OpenEdge AI Assistant, an AI-powered development solution that integrates with Visual Studio Code and other AI-enabled development environments. Available for both on-premises and cloud deployments, the solution provides OpenEdge-specific context that helps developers generate ABL code aligned with language requirements, organizational standards and OpenEdge best practices.

The webinar demonstrated how modern IDEs such as Visual Studio Code, combined with AI assistants, are transforming the developer experience. Developers can use reusable skills, markdown-based rules and automated workflows to generate code, create classes, enforce coding standards and accelerate modernization projects.

The presenters emphasized that AI is not intended to replace developer expertise. Instead, it works alongside developers within modern development environments, helping teams automate repetitive tasks andmaintain consistency to focus more time on solving business problems.

Building Applications for Performance and Scale

As organizations modernize applications, scalability becomes increasingly important. The webinar highlighted the benefits of designing applications for horizontal scaling with Progress Application Server (PAS) for OpenEdge. By distributing workloads across multiple PAS instances, organizations can improve application availability, resilience and overall performance.

The discussion also reinforced the importance of efficient database access. Many application performance challenges can be traced back to inefficient queries rather than infrastructure limitations.

Developers were encouraged to focus on fundamentals such as:

• Writing highly selective queries
• Understanding index usage
• Avoiding unnecessary table scans
• Reducing data retrieval to only required fields
• Eliminating unnecessary functions within query logic

Small improvements in query design can have a significant impact on application performance, particularly as environments scale and database traffic increases. The presenters stressed that modern architectures deliver the greatest value when paired with efficient application design and optimized database access.

Improving Quality Through Testing

Another major theme was the importance of shifting testing earlier in the development lifecycle aka Shift Left

Rather than waiting until code reaches quality assurance teams, developers should think about testing as they write code and validate functionality continuously throughout development. This shift-left approach helps teams identify issues earlier, reducing both risk and the cost of fixing defects later in the process.

The presenters discussed how AI can help generate unit tests, identify edge cases and improve overall test coverage. The webinar also highlighted ABLUnit, the testing framework available to OpenEdge developers. ABLUnit enables teams to create automated tests, integrate validation into build processes and measure code coverage across applications.

As AI-generated code becomes more common, automated testing becomes even more important for ensuring that generated code behaves as expected before it reaches production.

Strengthening Code Quality and Security

Testing validates functionality, but functionality alone does not guarantee maintainable or secure software.

The session explored how organizations can establish automated quality gates and security checks to evaluate code before it reaches production. The presenters discussed how AI often learns from an organization's existing code base. If poor coding patterns already exist, AI can unintentionally reproduce them in newly generated code.

To address this challenge, teams can define coding standards, rules and reusable skills that guide AI-generated output while automated quality analysis tools continuously evaluate maintainability, architecture and security concerns. Progress’ Software Improvement Group can help as well with addressing poor coding patterns.

The key takeaway was that organizations should treat code quality and security as continuous processes. By combining development standards with automated quality controls, teams can improve consistency while reducing technical debt over time.

Modernizing Delivery with DevOps and Automation

The webinar also covered modern software delivery practices and the role of DevOps in OpenEdge modernization.

The presenters reviewed core concepts such as continuous integration, continuous delivery, infrastructure as code and automated deployment pipelines. These practices help organizations create repeatable deployment processes while reducing the risks associated with manual releases.

A consistent theme throughout the discussion was automation. By automating builds, testing and deployment processes, teams can improve reliability, reduce operational overhead and deliver software more efficiently.

Technologies such as containers and modern deployment strategies that help organizations build scalable, repeatable environments while supporting continuous improvement across the software delivery lifecycle.

Improving Visibility Into Memory Consumption with the OpenEdge Memory Profiler

The final topic focused on memory management and application observability through the OpenEdge Memory Profiler, available in OpenEdge 12.8 and OpenEdge 13.0.

Memory-related issues can be difficult to diagnose and often require significant effort to isolate. The OpenEdge Memory Profiler provides developers with a way to analyze memory usage, identify memory leaks and better understand application behavior during execution.

The presenters demonstrated how developers can capture and compare memory snapshots to identify unexpected memory growth and pinpoint objects that are consuming resources unnecessarily.

By providing visibility into memory consumption and object lifecycles, the Memory Profiler helps teams diagnose issues more quickly, improve application stability and gain a deeper understanding of how their applications behave in production environments.

Final Takeaway

Throughout the webinar, one message remained consistent. Modernization is an ongoing journey that spans development, testing, deployment and operations.

Organizations that embrace AI-assisted development, modern IDEs, scalable architectures, automated testing, quality controls, DevOps practices and application observability can improve both developer productivity and application quality while preparing for future growth.

Whether your team is exploring AI-powered development tools, modernizing PAS for OpenEdge deployments, strengthening testing practices or improving visibility of memory consumption with the OpenEdge Memory Profiler, the strategies discussed during the session provide a practical roadmap for building and maintaining modern OpenEdge applications.

Watch the full on-demand webinar to hear all the insights directly from our OpenEdge experts.