OpenEdge 11.5 App Development Question

Posted by grolfe on 28-Feb-2018 10:18

We are using Progress OpenEdge 11.5.  Some time back, we created a Windows desktop application using Visual Studio.  This application has a data access layer that is Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).  The WCF uses ODBC to access the OpenEdge data. 

We are now looking at replacing a large character based application that accesses other Progress OpenEdge 11.5 data.  This character application was created a long time ago in ABL. 

The new replacement application would again be a desktop Visual Studio using Telerik UI for WinForms.  The  question is what should we consider for the data access layer?  Is the WCF ODBC approach reasonable or would you recommend something else? 

All Replies

Posted by dbeavon on 01-Mar-2018 09:02

If you have legacy ABL in the CHUI app, wouldn't you want to reuse any of that code?  Rebuilding it all on ODBC (SQL92) will involve some effort.

There is nothing wrong with WCF.  It is still a pretty solid technology and has tons of flexibility.  There is a learning curve that may be more significant than, say, REST/Web-API.

It sounds like you are settled on winforms.  That is a selection that you may want to be careful about.  Winforms is a pretty easy technology to start with, especially if your requirements are simple.  However it becomes very challenging to work with in the long run (as your requirements get more complex and the size of the application grows or changes over time).    

Posted by grolfe on 01-Mar-2018 12:52

Thanks very much for information.  We are pretty comfortable with Winforms, so that is why it is  our first UI choice.  We have used AppBuilder for some GUI development in the past.  We tried to make a framework there along with using SmartDataObjects and ended up with something very difficult to support.  I have only tried PDSOE for the simplest of forms.

We would like to reuse some of the old ABL.  I guess we could do that with REST.  We have just started to investigate  REST.   Thanks again.

Posted by 153102 on 02-Mar-2018 16:14

We like WCF a lot for most applications.  But we have also been moving to Openedge REST.  We discovered the response time so much faster on REST, presumably because the code is native ABL and not ODBC.  REST or any of the Openedge web service technologies highly recommended for accessing Openedge data.

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