Progress OpenEdge widens & deepens developer infrastructure services
Infrastructure software company Progress has continued to expand, augment, enhance (and perhaps even pare back where needed) the fabric and functions of its Progress OpenEdge flagship application development platform.
Aligned (as one might hope and expect in the infrastructure software space) to simplify the delivery of mission-critical business applications, OpenEdge 12.8 promises to help optimize their development processes, improve database performance, enhance application security and help ‘stay current’ with the evolving technology landscape.
Is Progress alluding to its platform’s relevance in the generative AI space with that last term? It would be hard to imagine it means anything else.
OpenEdge 12.8 sims to enhance developer productivity by equipping ABL developers (Advanced Business Language: a fourth-generation software application development language created and maintained by Progress itself) with tools and features to streamline their workflows.
Streamlining tools
These streamlining tools include enhanced OpenEdge observability functions: OpenEdge 12.8 integrates OpenTelemetry, an observability framework, with instrumentation to provide operational metrics and trace information.
Metrics assist in managing OpenEdge applications, while traces provide developers with insights into application performance to identify code bottlenecks and optimise application performance. With incremental build support, developers can also change their codebase and rebuild only the affected parts of a codevase.
“For decades, Progress has provided the technology businesses need to not only run effectively but to thrive as markets evolve and end-user needs change,” said John Ainsworth, executive vice president and general manager for application and data platform, Progress. “Whether you’re an ABL developer seeking enhanced productivity tools, a database administrator aiming to streamline management tasks or a security-conscious professional striving to protect critical assets, OpenEdge 12.8 enables you to develop, deploy and manage business applications that are more secure, scalable and agile.”
Developer productivity
OpenEdge 12.8 also offers advancements in application integration and environment management through improved monitoring and administration capabilities. Real-time messaging and streaming with Apache Kafka means businesses can enhance their applications with event streaming and data integration for real-time data feeds.
OpenEdge Command Center (OECC) is a state-of-the-art, cloud-ready tool and set of APIs that simplify managing OpenEdge applications. OECC provides centralised monitoring, administration and diagnostics, integrating popular Application Performance Management (APM) tools that are likely already in a given environment.
This release includes various database improvements that enable more administrative tasks to be performed online, eliminating the need for downtime for offline maintenance operations. It also offers a variety of performance improvements, especially in the areas of database scan/repair and backup/restore.
Application & data protection
OpenEdge 12.8 introduces several features to reinforce application security and help safeguard critical data.
For a security administrator or database administrator who needs to enable OpenEdge business applications with data privacy and integrity compliance requirements like GDPR or HIPAA, the Data Regulation Support with Dynamic Data Masking (DDM) capability offers an easier approach to disguise the sensitive data at run time, based on user role permissions.
OpenEdge 12.8 supports Hardware Security Module (HSM), which helps provide a more secure environment for cryptographic operations, facilitating the protection of sensitive data and supporting compliance with stringent security standards.
Finally, we come to Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 support.
OpenEdge 12.8 adopts OpenSSL 3.1, the latest version of the open-source cryptographic library which supports TLS 1.3. This (argues Progress) helps enhance security protocols and cryptographic algorithms to promote robust encryption and data integrity for OpenEdge applications.
