What is Common Component Specification (CCS) anyway?

Hello all,

I see some of you are asking for more details about what CCS is all about? Let me provide you with my thoughts.

OpenEdge community (like other communities e.g. JavaScript community) has many frameworks for modernizing OpenEdge business applications. Some of these frameworks were created by Progress like ADM1, ADM2 etc... while others were created by OE community. Done right, frameworks help improve productivity by providing common functionality such as security, configuration, session management, and more. But the challenge with selecting a framework is that our Partners and Customers feel locked-in so there is hesitation to selecting a framework as it is all or nothing. Wouldn't it be great to have components of framework work on a standards so they can inter-operate? Having standard based components of a framework would greatly help the community --- hence we have started a project to create standard specifications. Specifications will be crated and driven by OpenEdge community with a open and transparent process -- as described in the CCS charter document.

There are many other communities that have successfully created standard specifications by coming together as a group e.g. Java community or W3C come to mind, wherein a group of companies create a standard and there are multiple implementations of that standard specification i.e. JMS specification was created by Java Community and implementation from vendors like Sonic, ActiveMQ etc….

Having a specification with interfaces, dependencies and compliance criteria will help create a structure that enables inter-operability. It also enables creation of tools based on standard that can be leveraged across different implementations.

You might think, Sunil is talking about frameworks etc… and we don’t use any framework so this does not apply to me. Well…framework or not, every business application needs common components like security etc… and if you didn’t use framework, you wrote those components yourself. If you were to participate in standard specifications, you would be able to influence the direction of specifications. If you choose to align your implementation with the standard specification, this would provide a lot of benefits. You could take advantage to standard tools built for those components that are built by community and eventually, if you like you could replace your components with the ones available in the community.

Many of us have been writing business applications for a long time and I think it is time for us to come together as a OpenEdge community and define the direction of future business applications -- we have the expertise, lets collaborate and build something that defines the future of business applications. Now that’s powerful! I hope you all agree with our philosophy and contribute.

Happy spec’ing!

Sunil Belgaonkar