View from the Edge

The OpenEdge Multi-tenant Advantage

I was just reading a recent interview with Treb Ryan, the chief executive of OpSource by Forbes  and I think he makes some interesting points. 

His main theme during the interview is that multi-tenant applications and a multi-tenant architecture will become "dominant" and "present a challenge to the relevance and importance of a large amount of open source software".   The interview also touches on the point that even when you set out to create a new web application, "[with open source] you are going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting".  Of course, this isn't just true of applications created with open source platforms.  

As many of you know, our vision at Progress for many years has been about simplifying the job of creating the worlds best business applications, and if you've attended any recent OpenEdge presentations, (Exchange Online or Face-2-Face events), you cannot help but notice that the vision has been refined to position 'OpenEdge as the leading SaaS Platform for simplifying service development and delivery in the Cloud..".

One very real way this will be achieved, and that customers & partners of OpenEdge will be better positioned than any other application providers, will be the multi-tenant database capabilities that have been announced for OpenEdge 11.  This capability is truly a market differentiator and will remove much of the "heavy lifting" that Treb refers to, let alone the myriad of other features planned for OpenEdge 11.

By the way, if you've not seen a recent OpenEdge roadmap presentation and you're in Sweden or Canada, I encourage you to sign up for the remaining Face 2 Face events that are coming to you soon!

Alternatively sign up for Exchange Online 2010 where you're sure to hear a lot more about how OpenEdge is the leading SaaS Platform for application development.

   

My First OpenEdge GUI Application, And In The Cloud Too !

Last week I built my very first OpenEdge GUI Application. I even used OpenEdge Architect to do it (I normally use vi for programming). The whole development environment was running up in the cloud. I performed this remarkable feat at a workshop during the Netherlands PUG meeting near Utrecht.

The workshop was ably directed by Peter van Dam, from Futureproof Software. He made it really easy for about 60 beginners to learn how to build a simple but functional GUI application with a login screen, an updateable data grid, ribbons, etc with an Office-2007-like appearance.

Each workshop student was given a login for an AMI on Amazon EC2 where the OpenEdge development environment was installed and configured, along with a few image files for icons, and a database with customer records already in it.  This was accessed using Windows Remote Desktop. Nobody had to install anything on their own machine. Peter led everybody through the exercise in two 90 minute sessions with a half-hour break between them. Since he was speaking in Dutch, I had some trouble understanding him.

Nearly everybody finished their application. I had some cosmetic bugs I didn't bother to fix (labels in the wrong place and stuff like that) so mine was not 100% complete.

A few observations:

0) Amazon EC2 works really well for this sort of thing. Dev tools, code, database, everything was somewhere in the cloud. You could start as many machines as needed and run them as long as needed.

1) I was pleasantly surprised at how responsive the GUI was, running Remote Desktop over a hotel Internet connection to Amazon's data center.

2) Developing with the Eclipse-based OpenEdge Architect tool in the cloud is a lot nicer than using some crappy development tool running in a web browser.

3) The Infragistics UI controls have a lot of functionality and are very complicated.  Without a cookbook, I could never have figured out what to do and which properties did what.

4) Programming by clicking, clicking, and more clicking with the mouse is really boring.

5) Boring or not, it's powerful.  You can get a lot done quickly.

One more thing: at the very beginning of the workshop, the hotel's router had a meltdown. It took about 90 minutes or so to get a replacement. Being clever folks, the Dutch PUG meeting organizers had scheduled two talks for after the workshop. So we did these first, while the router was being dealt with.

All in all, an excellent outcome. If I can do this, you can too.