Quick Start: Move Classic AppServer Applications to PAS for OpenEdge

System administrators can move existing OpenEdge Application Server (classic AppSever) applications to PAS for OpenEdge production and staging environments using the tools provided by OpenEdge and the guidance from this tutorial and the PAS for OpenEdge documentation.

The goal of this Quick Start tutorial is to enable you to run a classic AppServer application on a PAS for OpenEdge instance and update an ABL client connection to use the new APSV transport to access that application. You can use your existing classic AppServer code or the sample code provided.

Sample starter code can be found in the Progress OpenEdge General community: https://community.progress.com/community_groups/openedge_general/m/documents/3775

This Quick Start tutorial does not cover application modernization, performance tuning, application monitoring, or securing your instance for full production. Additionally, this Quick Start tutorial does not highlight all the latest features available in PAS for OpenEdge. Links to this additional information can be found in the Next steps with PAS for OpenEdge topic.

Prerequisites

To complete the steps in this tutorial, you should have OpenEdge 12 or later installed on your Linux or Windows 64 machine.

You must also have the ubroker.properties file and run-time code for your classic AppServer application and access to the OpenEdge database. You should also have Progress Developer Studio or Progress Procedure Editor to run the client-side code, but you can also run the code in the Proenv command-line utility.

To complete this Quick Start tutorial, you should have:
  • System permissions to install and run scripts
  • Access to existing classic AppServer application files
  • Classic AppServer configuration knowledge
  • A PAS for OpenEdge Development or Production license
  • Basic ABL development skills

Files and file structure for the tutorial

You can complete the steps to this Quick Start tutorial using your own classic AppServer application files if you have full access to migrate them to a new server, or you can download the classicAppServerCode.zip file from the Progress OpenEdge General Community and use this sample application to test the procedure.

The classicAppServerCode.zip contains the following files, to which your classic AppServer application may have analogues:
  • ubroker.properties—Properties file for the classic AppServer that is located in the OpenEdge-Installation-path/bin directory.

    This example ubroker.properties file contains properties for a classic AppServer application called app_customername_prod, which will be migrated to PAS for OpenEdge.

  • ServerGetCustNameSample.p—Sample ABL server code that returns a customer name from the Sports2020 database to a client.
  • ClassicClient.p—Client-side ABL code that accesses the server-side ABL code using the classic AppServer connection string.
  • PASforOpenEdgeClient.p—Client-side ABL code that accesses the server-side ABL code using the PAS for OpenEdge connection string.
  • databases.pf—Parameters file that accesses the Sports2020 database at instance startup. The database can also be accessed directly using a database connection string, but it is a best practice to use a .pf file that can remain in a static location even if a database changes.
  • classicREST/classicRESTService.paar—Sample classic AppServer REST application service definition file. To be used in demonstrating how to migrate classic REST applications to PAS for OpenEdge.
  • classicREST/getCustomer.p and classicREST/getAllCustomers.p—Server-side ABL code that supports the sample classicRESTService.paar service definition file.
  • events/session_startup.p and events/session_shutdown.p—Sample startup and shutdown event procedures that write messages to the PAS for OpenEdge application agent log file.

In this tutorial, you will copy a database from the OpenEdge installation directory ($DLC) to a working directory ($WRKDIR). You will also create a PAS for OpenEdge instance in the working directory.

If you are running the sample files, the working directory will be populated with the following file structure as you proceed through the tutorial:

WRK
│
├───classicAppServerCode
│   │   ClassicClient.p
│   │   databases.pf
│   │   PASforOpenEdgeClient.p
│   │   ServerGetCustNameSample.p
│   │   ubroker.properties
│   │
│   └───classicREST
│   │       classicRESTService.paar
│   │       getAllCustomers.p 
│   │       getCustomer.p  
│   │
│   └───events
│           session_shutdown.p
│           session_startup.p
│
├───database
│       sports2020.b1
│       sports2020.d1
│       sports2020.db
│       sports2020.lg
│       sports2020.lic
│       sports2020.lk
│       sports2020.st
│       sports2020_10.d1
│       sports2020_20.d1
│       sports2020_30.d1
│       sports2020_40.d1
│       sports2020_50.d1
│       sports2020_60.d1
│       sports2020_70.d1
│       sports2020_80.d1
│
└───myProdInstance
    ├───ablapps
    ├───bin
    ├───common
    ├───conf
    ├───hcapps
    ├───logs
    ├───openedge
    ├───temp
    ├───webapps
    └───work