New Apps, New Rules

I was recently directed to this interesting article from Jeffrey Hammond of Forrester Consulting. Apart from the provocative title, I think there’s a lot of interesting commentary and analysis in Jeffrey’s post. Of course, being a Progress-man, I’d like to pull out a couple of aspects and elaborate on them in the context of the Progress OpenEdge platform.

1. Omni-channel

Yes! Currently, we struggle with mixed-up terminology around “native” app, web apps and “hybrid” apps. However, developers shouldn’t feel locked into a specific device type or category in the development cycle. The Progress OpenEdge Mobile platform strives to offer a cross-channel approach, supporting a rich, collaborative UI development experience with a Cloud-based environment together with multiple deployment options available via configuration.

2.  API-oriented

Absolutely! Primarily dictated by the velocity at which the mobile workforce demands mobile apps, a vibrant “API economy” is key to enabling next generation apps that easily latch into value-added services. Universally available technologies, like REST and JSON, are comprehensively supported in OpenEdge Mobile for service aggregation either directly in the mobile client or on the OpenEdge back-end.

3. Elastic

Cloud economies are here to stay for application development and deployment. The Cloud enables close matching of compute resources to spikes or troughs in demand, and from a business model perspective it gets us closer to a consumption-based computing model. Many end-user organizations and ISVs deploying business applications have successfully leveraged Progress Arcade to enable them to take full advantage of Cloud economics.

With OpenEdge, we're constantly striving to enhance the platform to ensure a lot of what you need to build responsive business applications is “in-the-box.” We believe this is critical for a high-productivity platform. With the release of OpenEdge 11.2, we have taken major steps to not only extend the platform for Mobility, but also to effectively service-enable either new or existing business logic and make it easily available to all of those mobile apps coming down the pipe. Exciting times!