View from the Edge

Join us for a Discussion on Load Testing with Gus Bjorklund

 

Upon joining Progress in 1989, Gus Bjorklund fixed bugs in Progress 4.2N. Since then, Gus has joined the OpenEdge Best Practices team and he has worked on various initiatives, focusing primarily on the OpenEdge RDBMS. He has been a frequent speaker at Progress conferences and user group events and was an executive producer and session presenter during Progress' first online conference in 2009.

 

During Progress Exchange Online 2010, Gus will be returning as a producer and speaker and in his presentation, "Introduction 2 Load Testing", he will explain the real benefits of load testing OpenEdge applications and how to get started doing it.

 

Load testing is useful for a variety of purposes, including capacity planning, system sizing, regression testing, stress testing, and proving your application's performance and scalability to sales prospects. The key, as is the case with many other kinds of projects, is planning. Testing everything an application does is usually impractical so an important element of planning for load testing is deciding what to leave out.

 

Join Gus at his session "Introduction 2 Load Testing" at Exchange Online 2010 on Tuesday September 14, 2010 at 10:30 am. For more information and to register, please visit www.progress.com/exchange2010

 

OpenEdge Applications in the Amazon Cloud

Roy Ellis has been working for Progress Software since 1995. He started in Technical Support where he supported the Progress database on all operating systems for versions 6 to 8 before transitioning into development. He was a member of the development teams that brought you WebSpeed, AppServer, NameServer, AdminServer, and most recently OpenEdge Explorer and Management (formerly Fathom Management).  As a Principle QA Engineer he still regularly participates in customer calls with Technical Support. His most recent project is in the "Cloud", investigating and helping customers leverage the power of Amazon EC2 and OpenEdge.

Roy started working with the "Cloud" when he was asked to help an Application Partner deploy his SaaS (Software as a Service) Application to the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) platform.  From the very beginning he was impressed by the potential of this emerging infrastructure.  The Amazon EC2 and S3 (Simple Storage Service) are the basis for Amazon's IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).  This gives the ability to start, stop and manage virtual machines in the internet.  Amazon EC2 users can run any product they wish on these virtual machines.  They can backup and protect data in the internet on virtual file systems.  They have nearly unlimited resources at their disposal and they pay only for what you use!

Although there are many cloud providers available, OpenEdge started with Amazon, one of the largest providers, supporting both Windows and Linux operating systems.  Amazon has a very active development staff and has good documentation and forum support and they also have a very competitive pricing strategy.  Roy has written several "Getting Started" white papers to help users register with Amazon and then install and test their application in the Amazon Cloud and he's currently working on writing other best practices for the cloud.

Roy expects the Cloud to change the SaaS environment much in the way it has changed many other businesses and our everyday life.  The music industry is still trying to adapt to users purchasing music from the internet and not on media.  The television industry is currently seeing a shift to internet viewing and is struggling to adapt.  The telecommunication industry has probably changed the most so far.  And who can imagine a world without Facebook, instant messaging or Tweeting? 

Roy does not think all applications will be deployed to the "Cloud" but that it will become a powerful segment of the market.  The power of the internet will once again change business and as it does, Roy continues to investigate Cloud providers and services for OpenEdge Application Providers and for Release 11.

Join Roy and hundreds of other OpenEdge users for Progress Exchange Online on Tuesday, September 14^th at 11:15 AM EDT and hear Roy talk about OpenEdge Applications in the Amazon Cloud. To register, please visit www.progress.com/exchange2010

Learn the ABC’s on BTM with Progress® OpenEdge® in the Cloud on September 15th.

Gary Clink is an experienced OpenEdge Consultant and pre-sales Engineer working for Progress Software from their UK office. Gary joined Progress in 1999 having previously worked for a Direct End-User (DEU) in the Petrochemicals industry and also for an OpenEdge Application Partner (AP) working in the Transportation, Whisky (yes Whisky), and Personnel/Payroll industries.

Gary, having learned OpenEdge as part of his university degree, some 16 years ago, has always been interested in the rapid creation of business transaction processing applications. Gary has had a particular flair for development frameworks (having work with such frameworks as OpenStart, PS:eScript, Progress Dynamics, SmartObjects, and a number of others). Software Configuration Management has also played a key focus in Gary's career – having successfully deployed dozens of Roundtable TSMS implementations to address such things as version control, build management, deployment management, and legislative compliancy such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

Gary is currently focused as a Pre-Sales Engineer on helping large direct enterprise companies and government in the UK, Ireland and Scandinavia to expand their current Progress estate and to open up new technical and commercial possibilities using the complimentary products from Progress's extensive portfolio.

In Gary's session, Know your ABC's: Business Transaction Management with Progress OpenEdge in the Cloud, Gary will demonstrate how some of the complimentary Progress' products enhance the OpenEdge experience for business Transaction Management. Business Transaction Management (BTM) is a critical component in the new IT/Business relationship. Progress Actional, Progress's first class BTM product, translates data relating to an underlying IT estate into information that is relevant to various business stakeholders including Operations Staff, Application Development, quality Assurance, and Security & compliance personnel. With this knowledge the various stakeholders can make informed decisions, often proactively, to ensure the success of every critical Business Transactions necessary for the day-to-day running of a business. Progress Actional also offers the capabilities of automating operational Service Leven Agreements (SLA) against this estate, thus preventing issues or alerting appropriate staff to problems before they have even happened.

Based on the centuries old Hippocratic oath of "first do no harm!", all of this is achieved by using Progress Actional's patented technology; which combines centralized management with distributed policy evaluation, ensures no server bottlenecks and therefore no degradation in an applications performance. Actional has been performing this function for several years for technologies such as Java, .NET, Corba, Middleware, Enterprise Service Busses, WebService, MainFrame Integration, etc. Now, starting with OpenEdge 10.2B, support for the OpenEdge platform is also included for key components such as WebSpeed Transaction Server, WebService Adaptors, Sonic Adaptors, AppServers, AppServer Internet Adaptors, and OpenEdge batch clients. What's really exciting is that all of this is achieved without having to modify your existing application, changed your application's behavior or write a single line of new ABL code. In addition to examining OpenEdge's support for Actional, during this session we'll also see how Progress Actional can be used alongside the Amazon Web Service (AWS) platform for application monitoring and Service Level Agreement (SLA) Management on the Cloud.

Come and join Gary in his session "Know Your ABC's: Business Transaction Management with Progress OpenEdge in the Cloud" on Wednesday, September 15, 2010 at 9:45 a.m. EDT. To register for Progress Exchange Online 2010, go to www.progress.com/exchange2010

 

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.

   

Exchange Online 2010 - Call For Speakers

Planning is well underway and we are now accepting session proposals for Exchange Online 2010. Following on from the success of Exchange Online 2009, combined with your feedback and suggestions, we are confirming Exchange Online 2010 for September 14, 15, and 16.

As always, the goal of our Exchange conference is to deliver practical and highly valuable technical content relative to developing, integrating, and managing applications using OpenEdge and related technologies, as well as to provide a general understanding of related market technology trends.

To get all the details on submitting a proposal, please go to the call for speakers site, and remember your proposal must be submitted by May 7^th in order to be considered.

We are looking forward to a very exciting and innovative conference. Come back to this blog, as well as the call for speakers site for all the latest information on the conference.

Ken Wilner

Exchange Online 2009 - Behind the Scenes

In early Spring 2009, when we began planning our first online conference, we had no idea what to do. We knew that we wanted to do something unique and different, but had no idea how long it would take get things done, what would be hard or easy, or how many people we would need. We didn't even know the right questions to ask. I spent a number of weeks educating myself, looking at and participating in online conferences other companies, universities, and organizations like the Smithsonian Museum were doing. Among other things, I spoke at BravePoint's Virtual InterChange conference, which allowed me to see what's involved in doing a live broadcast.

We eventually decided to do something akin to a TV "newsmagazine" style broadcast with a number of separate programs and "episodes", using a variety of media and techniques. What we produced in the end was, on the one hand, not too far from that, and on the other, not at all like that.

We had numerous discussions about what to do, how to do it, and who we could get to help.  Also many arguments about things which turned out not to be important in the end. Key to helping figure it out and get it all done was Cramer, a production company that has done a lot of work for us in the past for our F2F (face-to-face) conferences and all sorts of videos.

Among the things we discussed endlessly were how many technical sessions we should have and how long they should be. Would anyone come? How long an attention span would an online audience have? How many days would be people be willing to "tune in"? For how long? 2 hours? 4 ?  6 ? Would people leave if there was "dead air"?  What should we do about people in different timezones? How many sessions would we have time to produce? Is live or recorded better? Which is harder to do? We got many different answers to these questions. In the end we decided on two concurrent video "channels" starting with general sessions followed by a series of 30 minute technical sessions with a short question-and-answer period in the last few minutes of each one, and a live discussion channel. The sessions were recorded but the q&a period was live. Would that work? We wouldn't know until we actually did it.

When we opened the conference registration site, we got a huge surprise. After two days, we saw that about two hundred people had registered. Then, over the weekend, registrations spiked up over 3,000 and continued rising. At first we were thrilled. Then we learned that someone had posted a link to our registration page on several sites that enabled people to find places where they could get free stuff. We had free stuff. Anyone who registered would get a free T-shirt. Over 4,000 people who had no interest in the conference had signed up just for the free shirt. What else could go wrong? I loaded all the registration information into an OpenEdge database and wrote a 4GL program to rank all the registrations and identify the bogus ones so we could delete them.

Gradually, things came together and all the speakers got their materials prepared and practiced their talks. In early August, we began filming. I spent 4 weeks at Cramer's studios, working with the speakers while we were filming and then with Cramer's folks (thanks Theo!) editing video while others worked on the web site, registration, promotion, and many other things. It was a lot of work but it was fun.

Finally we were ready. The conference broadcast went live at 8:30 am on September 15. We held our breath. Everything worked, with only a few small technical glitches. Here's a picture of the control room for one of the channels.

When the broadcast was finally finished on the third day, we were relieved.  We made it.

As we discovered, 30 minute sessions worked pretty well. Almost. In hindsight, we learned that:

0) 23 minutes of content with 7 minutes of q&a time didn't allow enough time for questions for most of the sessions,

1) our speakers were not used to speaking for such short periods and had some difficulty with that,

3) there were (deliberately) no breaks between the end of one session and the start of the next. Feedback says we should have had them,

4) the "networking lounge" and discussions were hard to use and didn't work as nearly as well as they should have. In spite of the difficulty some good discussion did take place.

Still, I think those were relatively small problems.  In the grand scheme of things, I would say Exchange Online 2009 was a success.

Session videos for the Exchange Online 2009 conference are still available for viewing for another month.  If you haven't had a chance to visit, please point your browser to http://events.unisfair.com/rt/exchangeonline~sept2009

Obrigado

If you have been following this blog lately you can see there has been a lot of focus on customer-facing engagements including Exchange Online, the UK PUG, and Australia Exchange.  I just returned from the Brazil Exchange event, I’ll tell you about that in a minute, and you’ll hear about other events in upcoming posts about other customer facing events over the next few days.

So do we do it?  Why so many events?  Well we think we have an exciting and compelling strategy with OpenEdge 10.2B being released in a few weeks, work starting on OpenEdge 11, and a lot of focus on SaaS and Cloud.  But we also want to hear from you.  So speak up and be counted.  Make sure your account team knows about your issues  and concerns, go to a local PUG event or other regional event, and tell the Progress representative what you think, or head over to Progress Communities , and  layout your thoughts in one of our forums.

But now onto Brazil.  Brazil Exchange, held in Sao Paulo on Oct. 21, was another extremely successful event with over 525 attendees.  The general session was very much focused on Operational Responsiveness and how the entire Progress portfolio of products can help you achieve Operational Responsiveness.  As part of the General Session, Rick Kuzyk put together a very exciting demo showing OpenEdge, Apama, Sonic, and Actional all working together to provide real-time visibility in an automobile manufacturing yard complete with a mashup using Google maps, and showed the dashboard running on an iPhone.  Very slick!!

And there were 15 different breakout sessions covering OpenEdge, Actional, and Apama, and while they were “all Portuguese to me” (literally - except for mine and Rick’s), there was lots of interest in the key capabilities that we are providing including OpenEdge GUI for .NET (sold out crowd) , OpenEdge support for Actional, OpenEdge Management, and RIA.

Excellent job by the Brazilian team, and I would like to thank all of our Brazilian customers for attending this event. 

And don’t forget, there is a great collection of presentations still available on the Exchange Online site, so check it out because it all goes away on December 17^th!!!

Ken

Australia The Tour, Part 2: Brisbane

Today we swapped sun soaked Brisbane for rain soaked Melbourne as we continue on our 3 city Australian Exchange tour.  Our final set of presentations are tomorrow (Friday) before we make the long journey back to Boston. OK, I know, you have no sympathy :)

But back to yesterday.  Brisbane was completely booked with once again 50+ people attending the day long event.  Brisbane certainly has it's own vibe, a little more relaxed than Sydney, but no less eager to participate.  During the tour I've been fortunate enough to share the OpenEdge roadmap detailing some of our thoughts and ideas for the next generation of OpenEdge.  Out of the potentially many new features, the one stand out proposal that generates the most questions & excitement is that of Multi-Tenancy.  Even for those not yet considering Software as a Service (SaaS), the thought of OpenEdge as a platform having built-in Multi-Tenancy capabilities right out of the box is a game changer.  Especially, if as hoped, it can be introduced in such a way that means little to no application changes for the thousands of OpenEdge applications out there today.  This feature alone would consolidate OpenEdge's leadership in the SaaS space offering end-users a huge library of Multi-Tenant applications almost over night.

As we've seen from other conferences, including the recent Exchange Online, the current hot feature in the product today is the OpenEdge GUI for .NET.  Shelley is constantly presenting to packed rooms, full of partners & direct customers eager to know how to make use of this great feature.  I had no personal involvement in the project that created it whatsoever, but each time I sit at the back of the room and listen to Shelley go through her pitch, my mind is always blown away by the engineering triumph that basically allows the running of a Visual Studio environment in OpenEdge Architect which is based upon Eclipse.  Not only that, but the fact that you can mix & match existing OpenEdge GUI with this next generation OpenEdge GUI for .NET is just a testament to the technical skills within Progress.  

As with Sydney, it was also good to see by show of hands how many people are currently using OpenEdge 10 and OpenEdge Architect.  I won't get on my soapbox again, but still it's good to see!

From a purely personal perspective, I'm also impressed by the number of people that have taken the OpenEdge Reference Architecture (OERA) to heart and are really embracing it's principles as they take their applications forwards.  One of the challenges we always face is knowing how well our best practices materials are being received, and used, so events like this give me the opportunity to talk to partners and gauge feedback.  So if you ever see me at any of our events feel free to grab me and give feedback.  I won't bite, promise!

We had a fantastic time in Brisbane and certainly from the feedback at the end of day Cocktail party, the attendees were going home happy after a full days content. Or maybe that was just the free booze talking!!

So tomorrow is our final day and if it's anything like the past few days it will be a blast.  We did by the way gain our hour back when we flew south from Brisbane to Melbourne, not that I still understand how it works.  I had some discussions at the cocktail party about this, but again all the reasons seemed to tie back to the cows!  Either that, or it's all about reducing the hours of sun light so as not to fade curtains!!

As always, thanks for reading

Mike

We're off to see the wizard !

And no, I don't mean Gus. I'm currently sat on the tarmac at Logan airport about to head for L.A on the way to Sydney Australia. Ok, so the title was a little corny! This is a posting full of firsts. My first blog entry on the OpenEdge Perspective, the first posted from an iPhone (so appologies for typos), and my travelling companion Shelleys first trip to Australia. By way of introduction I'm Mike Ormerod and I'm responsible for the Architectural Best Practices, SaaS & Cloud Computing technical strategy for OpenEdge. In my role I report to our VP of Technology Ken Wilner, the guy with the beard in the photos at the side there! We're headed to Australia to present at a series of PTWs located in 3 cities. As we go we will blog more to let you know how the trip is going. The conference agenda is packed full of great sessions with great content so we hope to see lots of familiar, as well as hopefully new faces at the events. The cabin doors are about to close so thanks for now and we look forward to saying more once we hit Sydney!

In case you missed the UK PUG meeting......

On October 1st, if you are a user of Progress technology and reside in the London, England area the Progress User Group (PUG) meeting was the place to be.

Forty PUG members and twenty perspective members attended the meeting to learn and hear from customers and Progress Executives.  Ken Wilner, VP of Technology shared the OpenEdge roadmap which prompted a lively discussion regarding market insights and future requirements.  There was a customer presentation and sessions on the Cloud, Application Modernization and SaaS.

In case you missed it the UK PUG was the winner of the Exchange Online 2009 PUG contest.  As the PUG with the most Exchange registered attendees, at 44, refreshments were on Progress.  No PUG meeting would be complete without prizes and networking opportunities.   

New PUG meetings are always being added to Progress Communities. Don't miss the next PUG meeting in your area…there's always something new and interesting to learn!