Startup Villa for You chooses Progress OpenEdge to develop their business applications and as a reliable, low-maintenance database

Thinking about traveling in Europe and want to stay in a unique holiday home? You may want to surf onto the site of Villa for You (VFY). Founded in 2020 by professionals in the travel industry, Villa for You’s goal is to provide the best personal contact and quality to help its clientele, starting with an easy-to-use booking platform.

What sets Villa for You apart from others is their high level of personal service to both homeowners and guests. To have a short line of contact with both guest and owner and make sure both have the best experience renting their holiday home as possible.

Villa for You’s team wanted to develop their initial platform to be a “middleman” between the two clients. In the back of his mind, Leon Kersten, CIO for the company and one of the main developers of the platform, wanted to create a reliable, low-maintenance database for the Villa for You’s backend. Through this, Kersten and the other developers would be enabled to have a stable programming environment, which in turn would help their frontend business.

However, the team was faced with two significant challenges; limited time to launch and budget constraints with their IT systems. Their ambition of creating a state-of-the-art platform and combination of startup-like obstacles, Kersten and Sybrand Welles, Villa for You’s CEO, saw these obstacles as opportunities to grow the company’s technology in effective ways.

In order to get the platform released in a timely manner, but also have it up-and-running efficiently, Kersten and his colleagues, turned to a product they had previous experience with: Progress® OpenEdge®.

When it came to searching for a product to work alongside what they had already developed, the choice was obvious for Villa for You’s team. Leveraging their previous knowledge of the product, the team began implementing OpenEdge and prioritized building the database.

Kersten was implementing OpenEdge while simultaneously building out their IT systems and vacation home rental business from scratch. Employee-focused applications, which enabled them to work in separate environments, in the core version based on the Progress product. Their website was also built out, but in a separate environment, soon following that, applications were made for guests and hosts. Kersten wanted to ensure the frontend and backend functions were working for each ideal user.

“OpenEdge provides us a stable database of alignment and gives us a very powerful ABL language connected to that environment to implement our business rules,” Kersten said. “ABL is an important language to us since many things we do are not automated completely now. Our other developer and I use ABL for a lot of small changes and querying when needed.”

Within its new database, the applications built with Vue.js and OpenEdge were able to be tested through developed processes.