OpenEdge 11.6.3 New Information : Kendo UI Builder by Progress: Application Modernization
Kendo UI Builder by Progress: Application Modernization
The Kendo UI® Builder by Progress® is a separate product from OpenEdge that focuses on modernizing existing OpenEdge desktop business applications by moving the UI to the web. These business applications are typically complex products that contain feature-specific modules that make up the application. The Kendo UI Builder product includes the following components:
Kendo UI Designer — A robust, extensible design tool for building responsive web apps. The Designer is installed on premise and runs in your supported default browser as a Node.js application. You can use the Designer to create the UI for your application from a collection of predefined, standards-based, Kendo UI-based templates for building data-driven views. As you work, the designer saves your views as meta-data. By using this meta-data, together with the UI templates, the Designer only needs to write a minimal amount of JavaScript code to define the UI for data provided by OpenEdge Data Object Services.
Kendo UI Generator — Integrated with the Kendo UI Designer, this component combines the Designer meta-data with its set of standards-based UI templates to generate the UI for your OpenEdge application as a web app. This generated OpenEdge web app is ready both for testing in the Designer itself and for deployment to external web servers for further testing and eventual production deployment, as you require.
OpenEdge Data Object Service support — OpenEdge Release 11.6.3 supports a new WebSpeed WebHandler service provider (transport) for Data Object Services, in addition to the REST RPC service provider previously available on Progress Application Server for OpenEdge. You can use either service provider to define a Data Object Service for access by the Kendo UI Designer and the OpenEdge web apps you create with it. In addition, the Kendo UI Builder can access Data Object Services provided by the REST Management Agent running on a Tomcat web server with access to the classic OpenEdge AppServer.
During Data Object Service development, you can also add new field-level semantic type annotations to the temp-table definitions of a Business Entity to customize options for how the Kendo UI Designer can render the table field values provided by the Data Object resource you implement with the Business Entity.
OpenEdge deployment support — OpenEdge supports integration between any web app generated by the Kendo UI Builder and a Web UI project that you can create in Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge. This new Web UI project type, allows you to immediately deploy a generated web app to a development instance of PAS for OpenEdge for testing in different browser environments. You can also use editors in Developer Studio to customize the web app at certain supported pre-generation and post-generation extension points among the files of the Kendo UI Builder and the web app itself. When you are ready for production deployment, you can also export the web app from this Web UI project for deployment to any Tomcat-based web server, or you can use external deployment tools to package and deploy the web app to a different web server environment.
The first release of Kendo UI Builder uses Kendo UI 2015.3.930, AngularJS 1.4.4, Bootstrap, HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript capabilities to generate a responsive UI. By defining and saving the UI in meta-data, the supporting UI templates can be written using the latest OpenEdge technologies and industry web standards. Templates can be customized to meet the needs of your individual organization.
For the modernization of existing OpenEdge Character, ABL GUI, and GUI for .NET system-of-record business applications, a set of high-level view templates are included. These predefined templates take a data source definition based on an OpenEdge Data Service Catalog, and automatically generate the UI meta-data for typical CRUD support, without requiring detailed user input. The OpenEdge application architecture provides a service interface for the CRUD operations described in the Catalog. This service interface is implemented on an OpenEdge application server with web access using an OpenEdge Data Object Service.
For more information on installing the Kendo UI Builder by Progress once it is downloaded on your system, and on building and testing OpenEdge web apps with it, see:
Note: The links above lead you to the online documentation. All are also available as a PDF download. The Kendo UI Builder by Progress: Using Kendo UI Designer is also available as context-sensitive help in the Kendo UI Designer.
For more information on OpenEdge Release 11.6.3 support for the Kendo UI Builder described in this manual, see:
Data Object Services — For information on the new WebSpeed WebHandler service provider for Data Object Services and new options and requirements for coding and annotating Business Entities.
Kendo UI Designer — A robust, extensible design tool for building responsive web apps. The Designer is installed on premise and runs in your supported default browser as a Node.js application. You can use the Designer to create the UI for your application from a collection of predefined, standards-based, Kendo UI-based templates for building data-driven views. As you work, the designer saves your views as meta-data. By using this meta-data, together with the UI templates, the Designer only needs to write a minimal amount of JavaScript code to define the UI for data provided by OpenEdge Data Object Services.