Exchange 2008

With Exchange being less than 10 weeks away, I thought now would be a great time to give you an update on our planning, and to share some of the excitement about things that you can expect to see.

As a participant in the program committee and as an observer of dry runs for some of the presentations, I can tell you that this will be a very exciting conference - one that you don’t want to miss if you want the latest of what’s going on in the Progress community. I think it’s fair to say, whether you go to the conference every year, and are just looking for an update, or you haven’t been to one in a while, and need a better understanding of what has been going on with Progress lately, this conference has something for everyone.

So with above in mind, let me highlight some of the key things going on during the conference, and you can go to website for more details.

Workshops

We’ll start off the conference with workshops. For the last couple of years, we have had workshops on the Sunday before the conference formally started, and these have gone so well we thought we would do it again. These are intense, hands-on 4 hour sessions, where you get to get your hands dirty with some of the latest technology. This year we’ll be doing an intro session on OpenEdge Architect, our Eclipse-based development environment, as well as as a session that will introduce you to the Advanced GUI. If you’ve heard about the Advanced GUI, aren’t really sure what is all about, this is a great way to get started, and this is happening several months before the Advanced GUI is released as part of 10.2A.

We’ll also have two workshops that are really focused on helping you to build your SOA. One session, Putting OpenEdge 10 Applications on the Bus, will teach you basic messaging concepts, and show you how you can get your OpenEdge application onto the Sonic Enterprise Service Bus. The other one, Solving Back-End Integration Problems with Progress Solutions (actually a 9 hour session), focuses on some of the typical use cases you will find in enterprise integration scenarios, and shows you how you can use Sonic and Actional to solve these problems.

Breakouts

You can go to the website to get all the details on the various sessions that will be presented, but with over 110 breakout sessions, we’ll have a good balance in terms of old and new. For example, we’ll talk about some of the OpenEdge technologies, and features that have been around for a while. These are things like OpenEdge Architect, AppServer, SonicMQ, Sonic ESB, and various database talks; technologies and topics that maybe you just haven’t found the time to learn about yet.

We’ll talk about some of the newest capabilities that have been introduced with our latest release OpenEdge 10.1C. These are things like structured error handling, i.e. try/catch/finally and user defined exceptions, IPv6, some of our newest OO features like static variables and methods, recursive relationships within ProDataSets, and a whole new way of connecting your OpenEdge application to Sonic ESB using a mechanism called native invocation. If you use Sonic ESB with OpenEdge or are planning to, then I’m sure that you will be very excited about this native invocation mechanism as it really simplifies the development of your OpenEdge Sonic environment when you run both OpenEdge Architect and Sonic Workbench in the same Eclipse environment.

We’ll give you some insight into what you can expect to find in our upcoming release, OpenEdge 10.2A. This is the release with the great new feature you have probably heard about, the Advanced GUI. There are 5 talks alone on the Advanced GUI, and one of those will be given by a customer who is an early adopter of the technology, and participated in our early Technology Preview program.

But Exchange isn’t just about the OpenEdge product. We will cover all of the products in the Progress portfolio including Sonic, Apama, Actional, and DataXtend SI, and we will show how those products can really add value to your overall solution as you build out your SOA environment.

And Exchange is not just about Progress folks getting up and speaking. We know that one of the things that really resonate with “you folks” is hearing from well, “you folks”. So 25% of our session will be customer stories, where you get to hear from people who are facing the same challenges as you. Where you get to find out what went well, and maybe what didn’t go so well.

Lastly, no conference would be complete if we didn’t give you a peek into the “future”; we will have several talks that are a little on the edge. These talks will cover things like Ajax, Web 2.0, and Bluetooth, and there is even a talk on Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).

Talk to Us Now and See You in Paris

To talk with us, and others in the Progress community about the conference, the sessions, and related technical topics go to the special Exchange 2008 forum we have set up. You can find it at the bottom of the PSDN Online home page, or just click here.

So if you are already planning on going to Exchange, I look forward to seeing you. If you haven’t yet made up your mind, I hope this note gives you some insight into why it is going to be such a great conference, one that you and your colleagues just have to part of.

And, after all, it’s Paris!!!