Introducing OpenEdge 11.1 (Part 2 of 4): Productivity Enhancements

"Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before."

- Franz Kafka, 1883-1924

In the modern era, productivity is also viewed as being able to do things faster/better/cheaper than you could before. This is really one of the mantras of Progress OpenEdge—not to just make it possible to create the world's best business applications, but to make it as easy and productive as possible. In continuing this long-standing theme, the latest release of OpenEdge 11.1 provides a variety of new productivity features.

Development Enhancements

It should come as no surprise that Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge, formerly OpenEdge Architect, is the premier development environment for OpenEdge applications. The productivity features of this environment, coupled with the extensibility provided by the Eclipse platform, are well documented in other places. What's new relating to productivity in the OE11.1 release includes:

•  Support launching a WebSpeed server directly from the development environment to simplify testing, and extend this capability and also that for Application Server business logic to be able to test on remote machines.
• The debugger is extended to connect to processes that are running remotely, especially helpful in debugging n-tier applications. And speaking of debugging, it is now possible to go directly to the source line of code from the debug listing.
• In the ABL, the LIKE phrase is supported in Method and Function parameter syntax, allowing a developer to keep parameters consistent without having to manually change parameter definitions whenever a related database field or variable changes.

Run-time Enhancements

It is also a main tenant to focus on the run-time performance aspects of OpenEdge for each release. Some of the new capabilities include:

• Significant improvement in the time it takes to rebuild indexes, often from hours to minutes.
• Five new startup parameters to tune network performance of network queries, especially important for large databases.

In the spirit of Franz Kafka, take advantage of all of these new performance features to achieve a significant metamorphosis of your productivity!