Progress announced the latest release of Progress OpenEdge, the flagship application development platform used by over 100,000 customers across the globe to simplify the delivery of mission-critical business applications. By leveraging the new features and enhancements of OpenEdge 12.8, organisations can optimise their development processes, improve database performance, enhance application security, and stay current with the evolving technology landscape.
“For decades, Progress has provided the technology businesses need to not only run effectively, but to thrive as markets evolve and end-user needs change,” said John Ainsworth, Executive Vice President, General Manager, Application and Data Platform, Progress. “Whether you’re an ABL developer seeking enhanced productivity tools, a database administrator aiming to streamline management tasks or a security-conscious professional striving to protect critical assets, OpenEdge 12.8 enables you to develop, deploy and manage business applications that are more secure, scalable and agile.”
Developer Productivity
OpenEdge 12.8 enhances developer productivity by equipping ABL (Advanced Business Language) developers with tools and features to streamline their workflows, including:
• Enhanced OpenEdge observability: OpenEdge 12.8 integrates OpenTelemetry, a powerful observability framework, with instrumentation to provide operational metrics and trace information. Metrics assist in managing your OpenEdge applications, while traces provide developers with deep insights into application performance to identify code bottlenecks and optimise application performance.
• Faster turn-around on builds: With incremental build support, developers can change their codebase and quickly rebuild only the affected parts. This significantly reduces build times, enabling faster iterations and accelerated development cycles.
Integration and Management
OpenEdge 12.8 delivers advancements in application integration and environment management through improved monitoring and administration capabilities.
• Real-time messaging and streaming with Apache Kafka: Integration with Kafka enables businesses to use it to enhance their applications with event streaming and data integration for real-time data feeds.
• OpenEdge Command Center (OECC): A state-of-the-art, cloud-ready tool and APIs that simplify managing OpenEdge applications. OECC provides centralised monitoring, administration, and diagnostics, integrating popular Application Performance Management (APM) tools that are likely already in your environment.
• Database online maintenance: This release includes various database improvements that enable more administrative tasks to be performed online, eliminating the need for downtime for offline maintenance operations. It also offers a variety of performance improvements, especially in the areas of database scan/repair and backup/restore.
Application and Data Protections
OpenEdge 12.8 introduces several features to reinforce application security and help safeguard critical data.
• Data Regulation Support with Dynamic Data Masking (DDM): For a Security Administrator or Database Administrator who needs to enable OpenEdge business applications with data privacy and integrity compliance requirements like GDPR or HIPAA, the DDM capability offers an easier approach to disguise the sensitive data at run time, based on user role permissions.
• Hardware Security Module (HSM) support: OpenEdge 12.8 supports HSMs, which help provide a more secure environment for cryptographic operations, facilitating the protection of sensitive data and supporting compliance with stringent security standards.
• Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 support: OpenEdge 12.8 adopts OpenSSL 3.1, the latest version of the open-source cryptographic library which supports TLS 1.3. This helps enhance security protocols and cryptographic algorithms to promote robust encryption and data integrity for OpenEdge applications.
OpenEdge is the leading platform for developing enterprise applications needing high performance, high availability and flexible deployment options for extensibility, scalability, security, and reliability. Developers around the world are using the OpenEdge application development platform to build innovative business applications that are the backbone of healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and other industries.