The OpenEdge Hive

This stage is directed at defining a UML Profile for ABL Code and Progress dictionary information. The goal is to arrive at an open standard since there will be far greater potential synergy if all people working on UML modeling are using a common vocabulary. This stage will occur in three phases:

The OpenEdge Reference Architecture (OERA) describes an overall structure and pattern for the architecture of modern applications, but does not in itself specify any particular implementation. Progress Software (PSC) has generated a series of whitepapers over recent years which discuss various aspects of this architecture with some sample code, but this code is limited in scope and there is no pretense of it illustrating production-ready techniques. More recently, PSC introduced AutoEdge, an “application example” meant to illustrate one way in which OERA principles might be applied in a real application, but it too is built on a number of simplifying assumptions and does not pretend to offer production ready code on which customers might build real systems without significant further work.

Purpose

From the introduction:

"This document outlines a set of Programming standards and naming conventions to be used on the OpenEdge Application Example application. These standards are a culmination of many other works including guidelines from education, John Sadd’s whitepapers and the Developers Guide."

One of the remarkable aspects of the AutoEdge application is that it is provided with an unusual amount of documentation. One of the categories of this documentation is the "Project" documentation, which covers programming and naming standards, UI guidelines, and an overall documentation of the structure. It is unlikely that everyone will agree with the choices made in this documentation, indeed, it seems apparent that the team that did the work learned from the experience and would do some things differently if they had to do the whole thing all over again. This node has been created in order to provide a place to exchange different points of view about these design documents.

PSC has created AutoEdge as an example application example to illustrate the OpenEdge Reference Architecture. The idea and purpose of AutoEdge is to provide practical definition and examples of OERA and illustrates many aspects of modern ABL and Sonic code and technique. AutoEdge is what an application, with certain ‘business requirements’, might look like if architected and designed following the OERA guidelines.