What's New in OpenEdge 12.0

OpenEdge Release 12.0 includes several product updates that are designed to achieve the following performance goals:

• Continuous operation—The goal of continuous operations is to keep your system running 24x7. This requires resiliency to failure, the ability to perform online maintenance while the system is running, and eliminating the need to bring the system down to roll out business logic or schema updates.
  To enhance its support of continuous operations, OpenEdge 12.0 introduces the following:

  • HealthScanner: a low-overhead server instance and system monitoring tool that system administrators can use to determine whether any performance issues exist. This gives you the opportunity to correct the issue, using a load balancer or a tool like Nagios, before an interruption of service occurs.
  • Improved Stop Agent and Idle Agent support: the Stop Agent API has been updated to allow all requests to normally finish up to a specific timeout before issuing a STOP, and waiting for all tasks to finish, before taking the agent down. The idleAgentTimeout property has been enhanced to accept these values so that it can be tuned for your application. Therefore, if the HealthScanner notices an agent is becoming unhealthy due to increasing memory usage, a tool such as Nagios can replace that agent before users are affected.
  • OpenEdge Replication after-image (AI) file streaming: in the event of a failure, replication stream blocks are immediately transferred to all target machines, not queued on the source machine for transfer. This leads to improved replication performance with minimal loss of data.
  • Replication agents run during transition: from a client perspective, the transition to the new database broker is smooth. The client no longer needs to disconnect and then connect to the new database broker—it happens automatically.
  • Online operations: several operations can now be performed without requiring OpenEdge Database to be shut down, such as before-image (BI) space reclamation, database log file rotation, schema changes, JVM configuration, index builds, and more.
• Service and data integration—Going forward, more and more applications are being assembled from existing services. Service architectures lend themselves to reuse, facilitate agility, and are foundational for web and mobile needs. Additionally, the modernization of existing applications towards a service architecture is an ongoing evolution, and OpenEdge 12.0 addresses this evolution by introducing Swagger UI support for viewing REST APIs. Swagger allows system administrators to explore the underlying management APIs for a running PAS for OpenEdge instance.
• Security—PAS for OpenEdge includes support for OAuth2 and SAML, cryptography updates, Spring Security updates, and more.
• Performance and scalability—In previous releases, database connection requests were handled one-at-a-time. If a request is blocked, it is put on hold until the remaining requests are processed. Only then does processing return to the blocked request, where the block may have been resolved for some time before processing becomes available again. In Release 12.0, OpenEdge Database introduces multi-threading, so if a request is blocked, processing can continue as soon as the block is resolved. In addition, with OpenEdge ABL performance enhancements, shared memory is eliminated as a single point of failure.
• Improved developer experience—The developer experience pertains to the coding, debugging, testing, and deployment of an application. To be productive, developers need to be equipped with a complete toolchain, from algorithms and backend services, to user interfaces and advanced components.
  In Release 12.0, OpenEdge provides the following features to improve the developer experience:

  • Docker support: you can now run PAS for OpenEdge in a Docker container, enabling continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) of your OpenEdge applications.
  • ABL enhancements: new memory stream classes, the ability to resize a fixed indeterminate array, STOP condition improvements, new server-side join processing,and more.
  • Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge updates: Performance Profiler enhancements, new ABL editor options, support for importing and exporting workspace settings, and bundled tool updates including a new code analyzer for ABL.

For more information, see the following topics:

• Progress Application Server for OpenEdge
• SQL
• Database
• OpenEdge Management
• ABL
• Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge
• DataServers