The OpenEdge Hive

The OERA Open Source Initiative (OERA OSI) is a project to define, create, and refine a series of production quality components which can serve as a sound basis for those creating their own OERA implementations. The primary focus will be components which would form a portion of the Common Infrastructure portion of the standard OERA model, but we will not exclude contributions for other sorts of helper classes which might be used as part of a Data Access, Business Logic, or UI layer.

Transformation Triangle: For use in Transformation Triangle page

Official website of the iMo consortium

This group will be used to tag all OE Hive content which relates to UML, modeling, and the Enterprise Architect product. Subscribe to this group to be notified of any additions or changes to this content.

The Enterprise Architect product from Sparx Systems is emerging as the preferred UML modeling tool at many OpenEdge sites. In order to make it easy for people to get started using this powerful tool, information will be collected here to assist people in this process.

At Exchange 2007, a session entitled "Mashup Basics" was presented. In that session, we demonstrated the ability to add value to an OpenEdge application by 'mashing up' content from other sources. The examples we used were aggregated RSS feeds from Yahoo Pipes and a Google Map.

As many people are familiar with the OERA reference application (AutoEdge), we used it as the vehicle per se to demonstrate this capability.

Attached is a zip file with the modified code and instructions on how to implement this demo enhancement into your version of AutoEdge.

Overview
Given the need to enhance or transform a large existing ABL application, one is often hampered in the task by limited or out of date documentation. This project seeks to create a tool set that will read existing ABL code and the corresponding database to build a UML model of the application. This model can then be used for analysis and potentially can serve as the basis for future changes.

This project will consist of three stages:
1. Defining a UML "Profile" for ABL so that there are appropriate UML stereotypes to express the structural realities and relationships of ABL code and the corresponding dictionary.
2. Creating a tool for loading Progress dictionary information into a UML modeling tool using these stereotypes.
3. Creating a tool which will read and analyze ABL code and then load this information into a UML modeling tool using the stereotypes of the Profile.

The OpenEdge Reference Architecture (OERA) describes an overall structure and pattern for the architecture of modern applications, but does not in itself specify any particular implementation. Progress Software (PSC) has generated a series of whitepapers over recent years which discuss various aspects of this architecture with some sample code, but this code is limited in scope and there is no pretense of it illustrating production-ready techniques. More recently, PSC introduced AutoEdge, an “application example” meant to illustrate one way in which OERA principles might be applied in a real application, but it too is built on a number of simplifying assumptions and does not pretend to offer production ready code on which customers might build real systems without significant further work.

This sample code complements John Sadd's white paper Implementing the OpenEdge® Reference Architecture: 8: Context Management.

By default, AutoEdge uses a "very" optimistic locking approach. That is, all changes are saved to the database without first checking to see if the modified record has in fact been changed. Here is one example of how optimistic locking could be implemented in AutoEdge.