differences between progress and the other languages/banks

Probably the most important differences between ABL and 3GL languages include:

1. ABL is fully data- and trasactional- aware (and developers do not need to learn and use other languages, like SQL, for data management)

2. ABL is purposed to develop business applications

3. ABL is intuitive, easy to learn and with high degree of expressive power

4. ABL provides abstraction, for example, from low level technologies or standards and lets developers focus on the business functionality

5. Deployment flexibility. The runtime platform (AVM = ABL Virtual Machine) is available on Windows, Linux and UNIX

6. Data source flexibility. The OpenEdge platform has it's own RDBMS, but ABL can be used against Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and ODBC data sources.

This leads, among other benefits, to high development productivity

Other sources of information:

'Introducing OpenEdge® Advanced Business Language (ABL)'

http://www.psdn.com/library/entry!default.jspa?categoryID=1176&externalID=21

Excerpts from '10.1B ABL Handbook'

http://www.psdn.com/library/entry.jspa?externalID=1928&categoryID=464

ABL (Advanced Business Language) is a high-level programming language,developed to enable you to build almost all aspects of an enterprise business application, from the user interface to the database access and business logic. ABL is versatile and extraordinarily powerful.

ABL includes powerful statements and keywords that are specialized for building business applications. Single programming statements in ABL can do the work of dozens or possibly hundreds of lines of code in a standard 3GL, such as Visual Basic, Java, or C++. A single ABL statement can bring data all the way from the application database to the user interface, or return a user’s changes back to the database. Other statements let you program with great precision, even down to the level of extracting individual bits from a data stream. This flexibility is what gives ABL its great power as a development language.

In its first releases, in the early 1980s, ABL allowed developers to build character interface applications that ran on a wide variety of hardware platforms, including many varieties of UNIX, DOS, and some other operating systems no longer in use. Early OpenEdge applications

were, from the very first, portable between platforms so that a developer could simply move application programs from one type of machine to another.

With the increasing presence of Microsoft Windows as a platform for graphical interfaces, ABL evolved to support those interfaces, with all their various visual controls, as well as the event-driven programming constructs needed for a menu-and-mouse-driven application. Today

ABL continues to grow, with newer extensions to provide more and more dynamic definition of application components, as well as access to open technologies such as XML, and a host of other constructs to support an open application development and deployment environment.

And all the while, ABL-based applications can be brought from one release to the next largely without change. ABL provides a degree of compatibility and upward migration from one release to the next unmatched (unattempted, really) by any other high-level programming language. One of the newest enhancements to ABL, starting with OpenEdge Release 10.1A, is the addition of classes. Classes enable you to design and implement entire applications as a collection of related and strongly-typed objects using the principles of object-oriented programming (OOP).

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