View from the Edge

What is Application Modernization all about and why should you care?

For successful businesses, the saying “don’t fix what ain’t broke,” has long been the standby guideline. That said, while your applications may technically be running properly, they very well might be quite broken.  It just depends on your definition of broken.

Today’s developers and technology strategists look upon an application with additional scrutiny. A “broken” application can be one that carries any inherent risk to many companies in ways that you may not have considered, such as: 

• Lack of employee productivity
• Less than stellar business process efficiency
• Customer dissatisfaction due to speed of service delivery
• Negatively affecting employee/customer retention and/or acquisition

For example, one of our customer’s that I was meeting with mentioned that its point-of-sale (POS) system, while running quite well and doing everything the company needed it to do, however unknown to them -it was in fact an inhibitor to the recruitment efforts for new sales associates in the stores. 

In this case, it came down to the user interface. The company’s application was functional, but it seemed terribly out of date to nearly anyone looking at it for the first time. The company learned that potential employees, who were 17-24 years of age, not only feared a steep learning curve, but actually perceived the POS system to be difficult to use, as they were used to a more “IPod” look & feel.

This is because the 21st century workforce is largely made up of digital natives, people who have grown up with an electronic lifestyle.  They are quite used to the human-machine interaction – but they absolutely need to feel at home in the user-interface of the applications that they use.

There are many easy ways to update applications, without requiring a complete redesign or even rip & replace of the back-end.  Some, like in the example above, center on the user interface.  Other application modernization efforts may focus on adding devices that are more suited for data entry in the worker’s environment, for example, enabling the use of ruggedized scanners at loading docks, or inclusion of data arising from digital scales.

Updating your applications may also save money in the long run. Out of date, sprawling applications tend to be more expensive to support.  As an old application continues to age, fewer folks within the IT organization may actually understand how the application was built or how to support it.  Inefficient applications may also lead to extraneous resource use (i.e., Internet bandwidth, database size) or require more constant support on the back-end.  Further, quite often, developers must spend time managing various versions of the application, instead of being able to update just one set of code.

The bottom line is that business workflows are continuing to change to become more dynamic and efficient, so applications need to be changed as well to best support those new processes.  That is what we see as a sure sign for the need to undertake an Application Modernization effort.

UK and Scandinavian PUG Events

We made a key part of our strategy for 2010 support for the OpenEdge community. We think we have a very compelling story with what we have delivered in OpenEdge 10.2B, and what we are working on in OpenEdge 11. Everything we are hearing supports that so we want to ensure that the story is getting out.

In that vein, we are providing strong support for the numerous PUG (Progress User Group) events that are being held around the world. In fact a couple of weeks ago I was in the London at the UK PUG event held in our corporate offices in Slough and in Lillehammer, Norway (O.K. It was actually Øyer) presenting to a combined Sweden/Norway Pug event.

Both events had 40-50 people, a nice collection of sessions covering a broad range of topics including several sessions by me. At both events I shared with the attendees the Progress vision for Operational Responsiveness, and introduced them to RPM (Responsive Process Management). I also reviewed with them the key features in OpenEdge 10.2B including Transparent Data Encryption, and introduced them to some of the key features in OpenEdge 11 including Multi-tenant Tables, Multi-tenant AppServer, and our thoughts around automated deployment to the cloud.

In Norway I also went into detail in terms of a number of best practices around building SaaS including multi-tenancy, UI flexibility, etc.

And there were lots of other great sessions as well. In the UK, British Airways gave a very comprehensive session on how they used Sonic, Actional, and DataXtend to build out a robust SOA infrastructure. Gary Clink showed how to achieve Business Transaction Assurance within your IT infrastructure using Actional and the AutoEdge sample application. There were other great sessions on SaaS, OO, and BI as well.

In Norway, Jarmo Nieminen gave an introduction to OpenEdge Architect, OpenEdge Replication, and OpenEdge Management.

Two of Progress' technology partners, Mike Fechner and Robert Prediger showed how OpenEdge is open and flexible enough that you can really use it with whatever UI technology you want. Mike showed how the OpenEdge GUI for .NET is great for building compelling desktop UIs and showed some tools that simplify migrating from the OpenEdge GUI to the GUI for .NET.

Robert showed how you can build AJAX style UIs for your OpenEdge application and showed off his Backbase-enabled framework to help you get there.

And there were other sessions on the latest Progress corporate positioning, and on application and database tuning as well.

But the PUGs are not just about learning and technical content. They are about socializing and networking with your peers in the OpenEdge community. It's about building the relationships that will help you to be more effective down the road at doing your job. In the UK they had a very comfortable dinner on the evening before the event. And in Norway they did something that truly fit in with the culture and environment that we were in and is certainly fits in with what I like to do best. I think these videos speak for themselves.

So if you are not a member of your local PUG, please join. And if you are a member, plan to go to the next event. Offer to do a session that you think will help the other members. Not only will you learn something, and help others learn, but you will meet a lot of good people, and have a lot of fun.

Ken Wilner

RIA Rich Clients mainstream in 2-5 years? Progress customers have them since the year 2000!

In the recent research note “Hype Cycle for Web and User Interaction Technologies, 2008”¹, published 7 July 2008 (Gartner document ID Number: G00159447),  Gartner provides a comprehensive analysis of user interface technologies for the Web throughout the Hype Cycle² stages: from Technology Trigger to Plateau of Productivity through Peak of Inflated Expectations.   In addition, for each technology Gartner assigns a projection of Years to Mainstream Adoption.

The section of the document that caught my attention and inspired me to write this blog is ‘RIA Rich Client’ by Ray Valdes.   Gartner defines ‘RIA Rich Client’ to refer to ‘…a subset of Rich Internet Application (RIA) platforms that consist of outside-the-browser client-side technology, such as Adobe Air, Sun Microsystems’ Java FX, Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation, Eclipse Rich Client Platform and IBM Lotus Expeditor…’   Gartner places ‘RIA Rich Client’ in the Peak of Inflated Expectations stage with 2-5 years to Mainstream Adoption.

This is good news for Progress® customers because they have been using RIA Rich Client ‘world-class business applications³ since the year 2000, when we first introduced Progress® WebClient™ with IntelliStream™!

Progress WebClient – a product of the Progress OpenEdge® platform to deploy, provision and run Windows-desktop GUI business applications outside-the-browser over the Internet, Intranet or LAN – provides the same support for Windows-desktop graphical user interfaces as the traditional Client/Server OpenEdge client product. Once users install WebClient on their PC (one time download), they can quickly download the user interface components they need and run the application. 

You can launch Progress WebClient either from a shortcut or from a Web browser, but it does not actually run in the browser. WebClient runs in its own window as a separate application, not as a traditional plug-in to a Web browser, and not using emulation (e.g. Citrix or Terminal Services).

IntelliStream™ is a Progress technology to automate deployment and provisioning.  IntelliStream features a flexible, server-based provisioning model where ISVs can choose whether they want to provision the application from Web servers, file servers or even on OpenEdge AppServers.  IntelliStream enables WebClient to determine whether the application components have changed and need to be updated. Then WebClient downloads only those user interface resources to the users’ PC. It delivers exactly the parts of an application that end users need, when they need them. 

But we’ve not been standing still since the year 2000.  Because business power users need state-of-the-art user interfaces, WebClient has evolved to support .NET Winforms as well.

In summary, Progress WebClient retains all the richness of the traditional GUI clients but with the reach of the Internet, and automates deployment and provisioning for flexibility, ease of use and to keep the costs down, that is: Rich Client RIAs. 

--
References:
¹ Hype Cycle for Web and User Interaction Technologies, 2008
Publication Date: 7 July 2008 ID Number: G00159447
David Gootzit, Gene Phifer, Ray Valdes, Nikos Drakos, Anthony Bradley, Kathy Harris, Daniel Sholler, Massimo Pezzini, Yefim V. Natis, Bill Gassman, David Mitchell Smith, David W. Cearley, Roy W. Schulte, Stephen Prentice, Nicholas Gall, William Clark, Anne Lapkin
http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=159447

² Understanding Hype Cycles
http://www.gartner.com/it/products/research/methodologies/research_hype.jsp

³ Progress WebClient-based business applications in production include hundreds of enterprise applications across most verticals, for example: Financial and Stock Broker Mgmt (5500 users), Growers Mgmt  (7000 users), Hospitals Mgmt, Libraries Mgmt,  Managed Healthcare, and many more.

Ajax in Perspective

Don’t get me wrong. I am a big fan of Ajax. In fact I spoke on Ajax at the Progress Exchange conferences in 2006 and 2007, and was very excited to see that several customers were speaking at Exchange 2008 on how to use Ajax with OpenEdge. However, given all of the hype around Ajax, I was surprised to see a recent Forrester Research report, reported on by ComputerWorld, that Ajax is not exactly living up to expectations.

You see conventional wisdom would say that with Ajax, we have finally solved the rich vs. reach problem. No longer do we need to decide if we want our applications to give users a rich dynamic experience that is tightly integrated with the desktop like a traditional desktop application, or do we want to allow our users to have access to our application where ever they are without installing anything by building a Web (browser)-based application.

With Ajax I apparently get the best of both worlds. All I need to do is pick an Ajax library is write a little bit of Javascript code or better yet use a open source Javascript library like Dojo, Prototype, ExtJS, or script.aculo.us, to simplify the development process, and presto, I now have a rich user interface running in the browser just like it runs on a desktop.

And while that certainly would be great, according to Forrester, apparently things aren’t as simple as that. According to the Forrester report while Ajax is great for the “occasional user” or the “very infrequent user”, for the “power user”, that is the user that is using the application for a significant part of the day to do their job, Ajax just isn’t holding up.

 You can read the Forrester report, or the ComputerWorld article yourself to get all the details, but suffice it to say that the reasons why Ajax is not holding up is centered around rendering performance when building complex screens, and network performance because most Ajax tend to go to the server to do validation much more than they do in a desktop-based client-server application. And while many of the Ajax libraries do a pretty good job of hiding differences across the latest versions of the most popular browsers, the problem is not completely solved because many IT organizations use  several versions of many different types of browsers and incompatibilities still do exist even with the latest versions.

So, what does this all mean? Should you stay away from Ajax? Of course not. What it does mean, however, as Salvador Vinals points out in his post in the Progress SaaS blog, and as is discussed in the Forrester report, is that you need to pick the UI technology that meets the needs of the end-user, and if your application has multiple different types of end-users with different usage patterns, then it may be highly appropriate to support more than one type of UI.

So if you have occasional users or infrequent users, users that move around a lot, and need to be able to get to the application from where ever they are then you certainly should consider building a Web UI and using Ajax to get a richer experience. I certainly would encourage it.

However, if your users are power users using a complex UI and primarily using the application from one location, then using one of the more traditional desktop UI technologies may be more appropriate.

And because we know that needs of the users and UI technologies change fairly frequently, one of the most important things you can do is architect your application based on the principles and guidelines of the OpenEdge Reference Architecture so that you can more easily change your UI or support multiple UIs when the need arises.