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Application Development with Progress OpenEdge

Developing the World's Best Business Applications

Timing is everything with business applications. Speed to market is essential for competitive advantage. Satisfying customer requests as quickly as possible is critical to retaining business. Being agile enough to meet a supply-chain partner's new integration requirements can make or break a deal. And the application development environment you choose can hold you back or allow you to react and move on opportunities. The OpenEdge development environment balances productivity with flexibility to enable you to move quickly, in any direction you need for your business applications.

High productivity tools and an integrated application development environment accelerate every aspect of development. A single, unified environment enables developers to build Web-based applications, client-server applications, distributed applications in addition to creating and integrating XML, Java-based messaging, Web services, and .NET and Java clients.

No Compromise on Productivity and Flexibility

How can an environment be both productive and flexible? Productivity generally results from automation, templates, and set rules. These save time, but they also limit choice. Flexibility on the other hand means that you can build precisely what you want, by doing it yourself, one line of code at a time.

OpenEdge offers different approach. At the core of OpenEdge application development is the Progress 4GL, a language specifically purposed to express business processes as efficiently as possible. Understanding that today's application developer has to deal with a complex set of technologies, the Progress 4GL has evolved to include interfaces to the key industry standards, such as XML and Web services. An OpenEdge developer can create .NET clients, Java clients, Java messaging, even map database schema to XML formats, without ever leaving the efficiency of the Progress 4GL and the OpenEdge tools behind. For jobs that require manipulating specialized code, the Progress 4GL includes powerful and adaptive syntax.

Use the Right Tool for the Right Job

Wrapped around the powerful business-processing language is a set of tools and rapid application development methodologies that accommodate current business applications. A component-based approach further increases efficiency, allowing developers to quickly assemble modules of complex business rules. Code generators can take the same business logic and automatically create Web services or integrate .NET and Java. The development environment includes live application servers so that developers can validate their work immediately, which saves more valuable time.

Business applications vary in complexity and OpenEdge development tools scale to keep pace. To answer the challenge of cost-effectively developing, assembling, and managing all the components of a world-class distributed application, OpenEdge includes a repository-based framework, Progress Dynamics®. Using the repository-based approach, developers are able to dynamically generate multiple interfaces for a single set of business logic. The logic is stored in the repository and the interfaces can be dynamically tailored in response to customer profiles, "with" distinguishing characteristics, including language, corporate identity, or simply, personal preferences. Consider the possibilities of being able to achieve this level of service without adding resources. The framework also includes managers that handle the many tasks associated with distributed business applications so that developers do not have to waste valuable time creating standard services from scratch.