Mission critical business applications go through many cycles of incremental changes over the course of their lifespan, complete with code changes, compilation, builds, and validation. Often these cycles are repeated multiple times a day, before a release is made available to users. Continuous integration (CI) is a practice that focuses on optimizing the process of generating these incremental builds and validating them. For ABL applications, the OpenEdge DevOps Framework is designed to help with implementing an efficient CI pipeline that handles compilation, repository integration, testing, and packaging.

The OpenEdge DevOps Framework is comprised of a set of plugins designed to address the requirements of two types of users:
  1. Users who are new to the CI process and want a simple way to set up their pipeline.
  2. Advanced DevOps engineers with a complex CI process and additional flexibility needs.

The OpenEdge DevOps Framework also provides the convenience of sharing the CI pipeline configuration between the development and production build processes.

The OpenEdge DevOps Framework comes with two variations of Gradle plugins. The following sections will cover prerequisites for using the OpenEdge DevOps Framework and some basic concepts of Gradle before getting into the details of the plugins.