Progress Announces Updates to Pacific Platform

This past June 2013, Progress announced a new cloud vision and offering called Progress® Pacific™.  Readers of this blog know that Pacific is the modern Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that makes it easy for businesses to optimize their data and rapidly build data-driven apps and deploy them on any cloud or device. It can’t be stressed enough that, unique among its peers, Progress is the only PaaS vendor with the experience and product depth to be able to combine rapid app development with integration to all your important data sources in a single platform.

Just two months after announcing this vision, Progress released the first Pacific implementation. Among other benefits, this initial update dramatically simplified data integration via a cloud service as well as integrated Progress® OpenEdge® and business rules. And two months after that, at the Progress Exchange conference, Progress produced another release that included a highly intuitive, simplified user experience that tied all the components together.

Not resting on its laurels, Progress is going for a release trifecta (or in the spirit of playoff hockey, a hat trick). That’s right, only ten months on and Progress is introducing its third set of enhancements to Progress Pacific in what is being labeled the “Progress Pacific Spring release.”  Operating at cloud speed, Progress is set to deliver a range of key updates across several components. Major themes guiding this release include the continual pursuit of developer productivity and enabling superior end-user collaboration.

Progress Rollbase features a Mobile App Builder for fast development.

One of the most significant additions in the Pacific Spring release is a best-in-class mobile development experience. Now a single solution enables both web apps and mobile apps. A Mobile App Builder (see figure) is completely integrated in the Rollbase environment, allowing you to build mobile front end applications. You have complete control over customizing the applications using standard technologies like HTML5, JavaScript and JSDO (JavaScript Data Objects). Native mobile apps can be packaged for distribution on Apple or Android application stores.

Also part of the enhanced mobile development experience is the release of one of the first Pacific Cloud Services components: Push Notifications. With Push Notifications, mobile developers can create an enhanced user experience where mobile apps communicate and re-engage with users with the right information at the right time even when users aren’t actively using the mobile app.