Goodbye GLOBAL-SHARED.COM

In a few days it will be 5 February, the 10th aniversary of the “Progress Reference to Windows API”. It will also be the very last day of the global-shared.com domain.

It all started when Progress 7 was brand new; the first Progress version with widgets and persistent procedures. It was also the first Progress version designed for the Windows operating system and this was quite a culture shock for lots of Unix-oriented Progress developers who were used to editing loops and readkey statements.
Because of this, PEG got swamped for a while with questions how to deal with Windows, and there was one particular queston that was asked over and over again. I am not sure but I think it was something like “how do you launch an external program”. I happened to know the answer and repeated it every time the question came along, until I decided to write this single Q&A on my personal homepage, so I could simply point to it whenever the question was raised again. But if you have one Q&A you might as well add a second or a third, and a website was born…

After a while I had to move away from the personal homepage and was given the opportunity to put the API pages in a subdirectory of www.pugcentral.org and after yet another while, in februari 2000, I decided to register a new domain: www.global-shared.com

Mind you, it was a different time back then! While Microsoft and Borland users had real communities with user-contributed code samples and downloads, there was no such thing for Progress. There was almost no 4GL code on the internet except hidden in PEG discussions, there were no Open Source projects in 4GL and many developers seemed keen to keep their secrets to their own. Or maybe I just could not find any, because “progress” was not such a great search term for Altavista J
Anyway, my goal with www.global-shared.com was to start sharing, in both directions, because I was convinced that you will eventually receive code examples when you start by giving some away.

I think I can say that it worked, at least for a while. I have contributed a bunch of API examples myself and then other people also volunteered and contributed theirs. The end result is a fair collection of examples, of which only a small part comes from my desk.
Of course, the collection has stopped growing. Perhaps because Windows is not new or scary to Progress programmers anymore, or perhaps because it got more attractive to search MSDN and port their code to 4GL, who knows.

There were times when global-shared.com was not just about API examples. I was still concerned that Progress-related websites were so difficult to find, and that there were so little free downloads or Open Source projects. So global-shared.com also had an open, user-maintained collection of links, I have initiated the “Progress Developer’s Webring” and started the Prolint open source project with a lot of help from John and Judy.

Although the Webring seemed like a good idea at the time, I really did not like to manage it anymore and abandoned it. The ring is adopted by Greg Higgins.
Prolint is still a good idea, but it outgrew global-shared.com and moved away to its own domain (prolint.org) and is now here at the OpenEdge Hive (http://oehive.org/prolint)

So in the end, without Prolint or other exciting stuff, global-shared.com became just a pretty static collection of API examples, some of which were getting old too. You could say it was just an archive… up and running but not running hard… dormant, awaiting new opportunities.

The OpenEdge Hive is this new opportunity. The Hive is everything what global-shared always wanted to be, and more!
Global-shared.com has done its job and will now retire. February 5, 2007 is the last day for the old domain. All content has already moved to The Hive (see oehive.org/win32api), it gets a new audience, it has new tools for collaboration.

I thank you all for the past 10 years.


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Bye Bye Global Shared

Jurjen,

Your efforts have made me look good on a few occasions in the past.

Much appreciated.