Top Three Things You'll Love About Progress Developer Studio

Many IDEs help you get the job done, but they’re not all equal. Srinivas Kantipudi takes us through his favorite aspects of Progress Developer Studio and explains why they will help you produce amazing apps.

IDEs generally increase your productivity, but Progress Developer Studio takes it a few steps further and redefines the rules. I have worked on many different Java IDEs, starting with Symantec Café in 1999. When I started using Progress Developer Studio (PDS OE), every day was a surprise—I had an amazed feeling as I discovered new things in the developer studio, from the rich set of features to the different development environments and highly customizable options. I was impressed.

While these are the characteristics of most IDEs, something that amazes the developer in me is the particular way it does all this. To put it on a broader level, there are three things that I absolutely love in Progress Developer Studio:

• It knows you
• It gives you the power
• It gives you the flexibility

Let’s talk a little more about what I mean by these three reasons.

It Knows You

Progress Developer Studio knows what I want as a developer. Every feature that’s there provides me with different options, including an option to tune to work as per my coding style or as per my environment. In the process, it learns about me, learns what I like and provides me options accordingly—it even acts as per my coding style.

Here’s an example: I open Developer Studio and go to Project creation wizard. Developer Studio provides me with different project types, each one tailored for a specific need. When I create an AppServer project, Studio suggests I switch to the AppServer perspective, which will help me in managing servers and presents me with all the right views.

Then it creates the right structure for my project and by the end of the project creation, it knows my servers, where to publish my code to, how often to publish and when to publish. All I need to do is write my code and save my file, and the rest will be taken care of. How cool is that?

There are many more examples like this where the Studio knows how I want to organize my code and projects and does it accordingly for every option. All this is done with a well-designed balance between complexity and simplicity.

It Gives You the Power

Progress Developer Studio is much more than an IDE—it’s a complete application development environment. I can write my code, connect to my DB, view my data and do most operations on DB from Studio. I can write my Unit tests, integrate with source control systems as well as continuous integration systems, generate documentation for my code, and really do everything that’s needed.

Having everything in one place yields much needed power and a lot of productivity. Even beyond my example, think of any kind of development environment, from desktop and web applications to mobile and distributed. Developer Studio has the support and provides the capabilities to develop all of these applications. All without the need to learn any other programming language—a complex Visual designer control can be embedded inside your application without a single line of .NET code.

It Gives You the Flexibility

When discovering a feature, there are always times we refrain from using it just because it doesn’t fit the way our environment is setup or the way we like to do things. Maybe the way our code is organized or the way our projects and files are setup just makes it difficult. Not with Progress Developer Studio though.

Most features in Developer Studio allow the flexibility to finely tune them as per your needs. I have the flexibility to use my own Eclipse, to extend the Studio in the form of plugins and to customize everything. Developer Studio provides different perspectives and projects that are tailored for different development needs.

We can all agree that it is not an easy task to find software that is a 100% fit for everyone—it’s nice to have a well-developed option to customize and create your own perspectives, projects, menus and toolbars. This lets you optimize the software in the way that fits your development needs or your style of coding.

That’s Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge in a nutshell. It was with great difficulty that I could only pick my top three favorite parts—I wish I could have chosen the top 100 things I love in PDS OE. Feel free to share your own favorite aspects in the comments below.