OERA SIG?

Posted by Thomas Mercer-Hursh on 20-Jul-2008 11:52

One of the things that the Progress community doesn't have, because there is no formal international users group, are special interest groups who can share needs and solutions and potentially lobby the vendor. We do get the Birds of Feather sessions at Exchange, which provide some of this function, but it is an hour, once a year, and potentially in a place that many people can't get to. I would think it could be interesting to have something with more continuity than this. It might not take a lot more structure than to have a e-mailing list for the purpose and some participants who were willing to provide some direction.

I don't know that we need such a thing for all of the possible groups one might think of, but certainly one area where I think it might be particularly interesting is OERA. Lots of people are interested in it; a fair number of people are trying to do it to some degree. And, while we are getting some guidance from PSC, it is mostly whitepapers which are pretty general (and sometimes have dubious aspects) and AutoEdge, which, while an interesting way to stimulate conversation, is certainly not a model for how to build a production OERA system.

We hear on one forum or another from time to time about various people's efforts, but mostly only about when they are having a problem or about how they solved a problem that someone else is having. This is certainly valuable stuff, but there is no coherence or program to it. So, I'm wondering if there are other people working in the area who would be interested in some joint effort at addressing questions like:

1. What common infrastructure services are needed and what should they look like?

2. How does one practically support a really independent UI layer?

3. How does one use OO in the OERA context?

4. What are the right roles for temp-tables and PDS as data containers?

5. What rules might there be for guiding best practice as to what kind of operations and validations to put on what level?

6. Are there some good models or patterns for data access and business entity objects?

etc.

Some of these will sound familiar since, of course, this is some of what I have been working on over recent years, but I know I'm not alone.

I think there are some good dialogs to be hard and that with some spirit of cooperation this might lead to some open source projects which would benefit all of us. Plus, it would provide us with the grounding for presenting a business case to PSC for any changes or enhancements we might want.

If there is some interest, let's explore it. Possibly we could have a meeting at PSDN Live 08 for some lively discussion, although we would certainly want to do a lot of the work on-line so as to be as inclusive as possible.

All Replies

Posted by Mike Ormerod on 23-Jul-2008 15:13

I'm all ears when it comes to changes or enhancements. Well, maybe not just ears, as the keeper of the OERA I will probably have an opinion as well, so a mouth would be useful!

Posted by Thomas Mercer-Hursh on 23-Jul-2008 16:06

Yours is certainly one of the voices I hoped would contribute.

Did you see the recent PEG thread on framework components?

This thread is closed