Hello there!
So, to give you some context, I'm a young dev who just got hired at a company where the main system runs on Progress 9.1A. They haven’t updated anything in over 20-25 years, there is no active license, no documentation at all, and only two senior devs who originally built the system and have been with the company for 35+ years actually understand it. They’re both planning to retire within the next 1–2 years.
So yeah, pretty much a nightmare.
I was hired to create APIs so third-party companies can access data from their database. The problem is that this version of Progress is very limited. I haven’t been able to find much documentation, so my only source of information is the old devs. AI tools haven’t been much help either since the code they generate doesn’t work with this old tech. Still, I’ve been slowly starting to understand the system a bit more.
Right now, my two main issues are:
What would you recommend I do in this situation, besides finding a new job?
Any tips, tools, or documentation would be highly appreciated.
Right now the main focus are these APIs, but for a future migration of the system, , do you think it would be worth upgrading to a more recent version, or rebuilding everything from scratch using another technology? They’re currently using AppBuilder for the interfaces.
Cheers!
So, to give you some context, I'm a young dev who just got hired at a company where the main system runs on Progress 9.1A. They haven’t updated anything in over 20-25 years, there is no active license, no documentation at all, and only two senior devs who originally built the system and have been with the company for 35+ years actually understand it. They’re both planning to retire within the next 1–2 years.
So yeah, pretty much a nightmare.
I was hired to create APIs so third-party companies can access data from their database. The problem is that this version of Progress is very limited. I haven’t been able to find much documentation, so my only source of information is the old devs. AI tools haven’t been much help either since the code they generate doesn’t work with this old tech. Still, I’ve been slowly starting to understand the system a bit more.
Right now, my two main issues are:
- No CLI interface. The only way I’ve found to run .p routines is via prowin32.exe. _progress doesn’t exist in this version, so I can only export data through .txt files and read them later, which is not very efficient.
- No external database connections. From what I understand, it uses a very old SQL engine, but I don’t think it’s possible to connect to it from modern tools or technologies.
What would you recommend I do in this situation, besides finding a new job?
Any tips, tools, or documentation would be highly appreciated.
Right now the main focus are these APIs, but for a future migration of the system, , do you think it would be worth upgrading to a more recent version, or rebuilding everything from scratch using another technology? They’re currently using AppBuilder for the interfaces.
Cheers!