Where to start for Progress GUI Development?

[warba]

We've been on Progress and AIX ChUI for almost 10 years, and are on 9.1C, plus we have a Webspeed ecommerce site.
ChUI has been perfect for our applications thus far, but some are now requiring some GUI.

We read about ADM and Dynamics, but some of the Progress community seems cold on these tools, and we don't want to be locked into an inflexible architecture.

In your complex business applications, what development tools do you use to develop and deploy Progress GUI code? Is POSSE the way to go? Or build our own tools from scratch? Or, do we stray from Progress and use other languages and ODBC to access our databases? (I hesitate to even think of this route due to security and performance issues, but I have no personal experience using that configuration with complex applications).

Any suggestions? Fire away. (We currently have 1.5 million lines of Progress code and 9 databases totaling 40 Gig - so it is not a trivial application)

 

[Simon Sweetman]

Perhaps you should consider a code conversion exercise, with the aim to give you application a GUI look without re-developing everything. This can get you application to market quickly while you work on a second phase of re development and optimisation for the GUI environment.

 

[GOLDMEMBER]

warba,

I am glad somebody asked this question!

developers have been coding applications using ADM2 and smartObjects. The concept of smartObjects started with Progress 8.0 and current ver. is 9.1D. I can assure you - whatever your design and development requirements are you'll find answers, tips and solutions on forums like this. I won't suggest to jump directly to dynamics... give it some time and believe me ADM2 is rich enough, dynamics is just another wrapping to the same ADM2. you can move on to dynamics later if you want - or just like many other shops - you may feel happy with ADM2 - screens and objects are the same visually! and you'll have better control just by using well tested ADM2.

big steps - Please ask questions, see examples and try new things out!

small steps -

1) Identify the small module with not more than 2-3 screens of your application which has one to many table relations on some master tables preferably, requires user permission setting, data modification operations (add, delete,modify ) , data retrieval operations - like sort and filter and validations!

2) best way to learn is by doing it .... code the GUI module ground up using adm2 and smartObjects. - you'll have many questions in this phase! Ask them!! code it client-server way. a .pf to connect to the db and the screens doing the job. Don't go for appserver (distributed development at this time). Get yourself familiar with the smartobjects. this is your big move - from procedural code to object based code... this is where many grey haired progress programmers give up and blam adm2!

3) Identify the generic requirements - learn how to modify the code to be generic enough so that it can be used at more than one place - as is! Ask more questions!! if Client/server is what you want. your basic architecture is ready! you can expand upon it.

4) for a distributed application - get your self familiar with 3 tier design - (More questions - ask them) ie seperate visuals and cosmetics, client side validations and table transactions/business rules. you'll learn to split the logic by placing it either on the client side or the sever!(More questions - ask them) - may be you'll get rid of db triggers! (More questions - ask them)

5) answer questions when somebody else tries to do the same! so that lazyboys won't blam the tool for their own lazyness!