Question Why Progress 4GL? Do we have a comparison study?

[Saran]

Hi Team,
I am aware that OE (Progress) suits for all kinds of Business Applications. Do we have some materials that contains comparison study of why should I use Progress 4GL when I have other languages/DB's out there? Having said Progress 4GL is 30+ years old itself explains how stable it is but I feel we should be having some material that strongly puts forth the point why do we need to choose Progress amidst other latest technologies. Can someone point me to the documentation that explains the above need? Thanks!

 

[Cringer]

I can't find the links now, but there was a seminar at the 2012 PUG Challenge in Manchester doing an in-depth comparison of Progress and SQL to see which is better based on performance. Some surprising results apparently. I wasn't there as I was at a different session. Maybe someone still has the slides?

 

[RealHeavyDude]

While I can fully understand you and I think that Progress should provide such material I do think that technology comparisions are not the full story. Technology choices are subject to a lot of irrationalities if not politics as well as some very valid points: One of the most prominent reason as to why the Progress ABL ( the 4GL has been re-branded by Progress come OpenEdge 10 some 10 years ago ) has not been considered in projects I have been involved was the fact that I was the only one knowing it. Full Stop.

Heavy Regards, RealHeavyDude.

 

[tamhas]

There have been productivity studies ... no links, sorry ... indicating that writing in ABL is 3 to 10 times more productive than writing in a 3GL. Of course, tool set can influence this a lot.

 

[Osborne]

If any help, there was an OpenEdge and Visual Studio .NET Comparison done by someone in 2009:

http://briandrab.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/openedge-to-visual-studio-net-head-to-head-comparison/

 

[Saran]

Thanks everyone for sharing your thoughts on this! Ideally they can have one such for atleast Sales Team which will help in capturing new projects in market. I see people who doesn't have clue on OE but searching for a such comparison studies, so that they could start Progress Practise.

Cringer, I guess i got the presentation that you are referring to. (http://www.proora.com/oracle/ProgressvsOracle.ppt)

 

[GregTomkins]

IMHO, if you are comparing Progress and Oracle, you are missing the point completely. Oracle is a DB with a query language conveniently attached, whereas Progress is a (more or less) full featured language with a DB conveniently attached.

Oracle without an Oracle DB is like a 747 with no wings or fuselage. Whereas Progress without a Progress DB is like a 747 with wings built by someone other than Boeing. I know at least one company that has lots of Progress products that don't use their DB. And I think even most Progress supporters would rank their devotion to the language way ahead of their devotion to the DB.

So, I would compare Progress to, say, Language + ORM tool + DB, for example, Java + Hibernate + Oracle.

That PPT was all about limitations and structure and tools and so on, it says nothing at all about languages (since Oracle doesn't have one, really, well, SQL, but that's kind of different) or performance.

 

[TomBascom]

Quite right.

 

[no7892142]

(since Oracle doesn't have one, really, well, SQL, but that's kind of different) or performance.

Technically, there exists a language extension in PL/SQL - however it feels fairly tacked on to provide at least something. The tools to support it are also quite lacking.
Having been introduced to both systems and languages as a relatively rookie developer, Progress had won me over in a matter of weeks.

 

[tamhas]

PL/SQL is hardly a complete 4GL competitor to ABL. In fact, historically, there are few, if any, real competitors. Back in the late 80s when 4GLs were more the rage than they are now, one of the characteristics of virtually every 4GL was that the tough stuff had to be done in C or equivalent. Thus, per the 80/20 rule the 10X productivity improvement on 80% of the code was a 10X improvement on the code which took only 20% of the effort while the 20% that took 80% of the effort was unchanged so the net was taking 82% of the time ... not much of a productivity improvement. ABL was the notable exception where one could code the whole application in the 4GL and achieve dramatic productivity boosts overall. This is a bit muddier today with GUI for .NET ABL screens, browser and mobile UIs and the like, but it is still a feature which sets ABL apart.

 

[GregTomkins]

There is plenty to not like about Progress, but it's an enduring mystery to me why the central idea - that one language can implement both business logic and data manipulation, and that the compiler understands all about the database schema - hasn't taken root in the OSS world (which is in most other ways vastly superior IMO). Why everyone just assumes they have to spend their careers screwing around with ORM's and "impedance mismatch" and that's just how the world is, it's beyond me. And PL/SQL, etc. doesn't even try to solve those problems. LINQ, ROR etc., sort-of try to, but compared to what ABL does, not really.