ABL (Advanced Business Language) is a high-level procedural and object-oriented programming language developed to enable you to build almost all aspects of an enterprise business application, from the user interface to the database access and business logic. ABL is a versatile and extraordinarily powerful tool. Not only can you use it to program applications, but you can build many of the tools that you use to help create and support those applications.
ABL includes powerful statements and keywords that are specialized for building business applications. Single programming statements in ABL can do the work of dozens or possibly hundreds of lines of code in a standard 3rd Generation Language, such as Visual Basic, Java, or C++. For example, a single ABL statement can access both existing data in an application database and apply changes to that data in the database. A statement separate from the data access and business logic can bind data to user interface controls. Other statements let you program with great precision, even down to the level of extracting individual bits from a data stream. This flexibility is what gives ABL its great power as a development language. Most of the development tools you use to develop OpenEdge applications are themselves written in ABL.
