Progress Software recently transformed its OpenEdge 11.2 business application development platform into one designed for mobile application development with the addition of the new OpenEdge Mobile App Builder.
The new capability lets developers get their OpenEdge enterprise apps up and running on all mobile operating systems, the company said. “We added a major new feature in this release around mobility, giving you the ability to take your business application that you’ve been using and storing in our runtime environment, including our database, and allowing you to easily create a beautiful mobile application that will run on a variety of devices,” said Karen Tegan Padir, senior VP and business lead for application development at Progress Software.
The enhanced mobility capabilities include a visual designer and UI toolkit for phone and tablet apps; REST support for the OpenEdge application server; JavaScript data binding support libraries; and “write once, run anywhere” support for Android and iOS. The OpenEdge 11.2 platform will be generally available on Feb. 20.
The OpenEdge Mobile App Builder is integrated with the OpenEdge 11.2 back end, which the company said eliminates the need for developers to recreate existing services, and provides them with an optimized development environment for transactional apps. The company said developers will have the ability to extend their existing apps to support multiple mobile devices, as well as update those and future apps as the mobile market evolves and new mobile devices are introduced.
Padir said the company added the OpenEdge Mobile App Builder to the OpenEdge 11.2 platform because it has customers who have been using OpenEdge but were on various thick clients and fat devices. “The beauty with this is, we’re allowing customers that have legacy apps—that have been running on our platform for a long time—to be able to connect to their data from those legacy apps and create mobile apps out of it,” she said.
“They don’t have to re-architect their application, they don’t have to reconstruct their database, and they don’t have to actually export their data anywhere. With this update, these developers don’t have to be mobile experts to create their mobile apps.”
