Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Progress Dynamics Basic Development

Prescriptive development approach

Progress Dynamics provides an abundance of advantages when you follow its prescriptive approach for developing applications in the Progress 4GL. This prescriptive approach speeds development by allowing you to architect and code your application in a manner that takes advantage of all the out-of-the-box features the framework provides. At the same time, Progress Dynamics provides flexibility where it counts the most. By following the development approach detailed in this guide, you’ll be sticking with the prescription and discovering the most efficient ways to customize applications built with the framework.

The framework provides:

Standard component types with a wealth of built-in behavior — You can combine the components in many ways to build a variety of applications. You can extend these components by customizing them or by building new ones with a similar structure. Because these objects are already written for you and because many of the objects are data-driven, you have less code to write while building your application.
A standard structure for code that you do have to write — You have less work deciding how to organize and place your code so it runs when it should, handles messages and error conditions properly, and is easily maintained.

The following sections describe theses ideas in more depth.