Recently I have attended one of Progress Software’s Insight conferences (http://www.progress-insight.com/) in Frankfurt. Progress Vice President for SaaS Colleen Smith gave a presentation about the future of OpenEdge and gave an interesting early glimpse into what’s coming in the next few OpenEdge releases (OpenEdge 11.2 and beyond). While everything was following their usual disclaimer warning that everything might change without notice it was surprising in the most positive way to see a list of coming features together with a target release mile stone.
OpenEdge 11.2 is targeted for the first quarter of 2013, 11.3 follows somewhere between the second and third quarter 2013 and 11.4 at the end of 2013.
The planned features for OpenEdge 11.2 include:
Mobility:
- Visual Designer and UI toolkit for phone and tablet applications
- REST support for the OpenEdge application server
- JavaScript Data Binding support libraries
- One-click mobile app generation for ProDataset/Temp-Tables
- Write-once, run anywhere support (initially for iOS and Android)
Productivity and Performance
- Session-level Structured Error Handling
- Improved performance for AppServer invocations
- Support for SQL offset/fetch statements
- Progress Developer Studio: Scratch Editor
- Sub-Second PAUSE support for Processes from ABL
Platform coverage
- Windows 8, SQL Servers 2012 certification
- Eclipse 3.7 support
OpenEdge as a Service
In mid-2013 Progress will start to pilot OpenEdge as a Service, expanding the IaaS offering on Progress Arcade to additional on-demand services:
- An aPaaS management console integration to configure instances of OpenEdge in the cloud
- Build and deploy mobile applications with an OpenEdge backend in the cloud
- Deployment of AppServer artifacts from Progress Developer Studio into cloud instances of OpenEdge
- Billing, metering and monitoring as platform services
- Managed Services: Progress managing your OpenEdge infrastructure components
aPaaS community
Also in mid-2013 Progress is planning to launch an aPaaS community as an evolution of Progress Arcade offerings. Planned are the simplification of cloud deployments though Progress aPaaS and that the OpenEdge community will become part of the aPaaS community effort.
Further components of the aPaaS community may become job offerings or an employee job finder.
Colleen also mentioned and Entrepreneur and Education program as part of the aPaaS community offerings including free development kits for educational and start-up entrepreneur usage.
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