Disclaimer: I cut my teeth on Progress 4GL back in the 80's, which is now called OpenEdge. It tickles me to see them still around, and to have bought Chef? Well, that's just sugar.

Basically, they're a business apps technology provider, and have been around since 1981, providing app development tools for enterprise scale applications. Progress 4GL was a database-backed application environment, quite widely used (albeit quietly) by big businesses all over the globe to build apps, and has transformed into OpenEdge.

As the Web evolved, Progress seem to have embraced all of it, and - as you say - somehow seem to be using smoke and mirrors to describe what they do - but actually their tooling is pretty awesome. Write an app in OpenEdge, deploy it on any web server. They were doing big relational database stuff on cheaper hardware (PC's, minicomputers) in an era when "big database" meant investing heavily in "IBM" or "Relational Software" (now: Oracle) resources.

Its pretty neat to see them still around. I had a lot of fun with Progress 4GL back in the day, but haven't touched it since mysql/postgresdb was released ..

Ditto this. I was a ASP/VB-then-.Net developer 20 years ago and happened upon Progress 4GL when I had to create apps either communicating with or extracting data from Progress sources. My only beef was the horrifically quirky ODBC driver (and the convoluted SQL Server DTS packages & openqueries that resulted) -- 4GL was rock solid on AIX, and also on CentOS/RHEL once we moved away from AS400... and this was for high volume factory execution systems at a global EMS firm. Around 2010, we started a migration from Progress --> PostgreSQL+Java, approximately when the majority of the original devs began retiring. It was painful and the resulting "new" versions of our apps & DBs were universally crappier, even if "easier" to develop for and manage using "agile" methods. I frequently miss the old days, when programming was WYSIWYG and everyone explicitly understood how computers worked.

My job for years was developing and supporting Progress applications mainly on AIX. So much less crap to deal with than is common today. Things actually worked.

My experience with AIX as a sysadmin ca 2005 was dramatically different.

Things "worked", but everything was OLD. CLI tools had bugs and warts that GNU figured out decades previously.

I remember having to use obnoxious workarounds when tooling broke because 'find' wouldn't even work properly once you exceeded a certain number of files. (Several thousand, IIRC)

And that curses-based wrapper for doing administration tasks... glad I forgot the name of it, to be honest.

Getting Bash and the other GNU tools to run on AIX 3.2.5 was definitely a chore but I still miss those days.

The culture was a lot more active in the 90's. I mean if you were trying to port something to AIX and having trouble with gcc, you could go on comp.unix.aix and IBM employees would actually respond and be helpful.

We lost a lot when that era died.

Ah. I was off AIX and onto Solaris, and then Linux, by 2005.

smitty!

[[muffled screaming]]

> but actually their tooling is pretty awesome

huh. That's not been my experience. To me, it looks like they stopped improving things circa 2005. Things that are new tend to be half-baked (.NET integration, OOP language features). No command line compiler (although you can write one yourself and a java-based community project exists), no linting or other static analysis tools. Their IDE is eclipse-based and frequently crashes when working with GUI for .NET. The autocomplete and in-IDE documentation that it provides is terrible- missing methods, not context aware, etc. They have a docker image, but only for their app-server product. I'm currently building a REST API using their app server product and I keep running into stumbling blocks. I've built similar APIs in PHP and Python and those were (largely) easy- I could focus on the problem and not the tooling. Here, I keep stumbling over things that work differently than anywhere else or that aren't well documented at all.

Their earlier stuff is quite impressive when you judge it by the time. They just seem to have fossilized.

Progess is better known for their Telerik controls suite - many .NET developers use it in their stack as it greatly improves upon the builtin controls available in both winforms and asp.net

Progress offers several products I've used. You can build apps on their framework (OpenEdge) that manages all of the services and data storage. They also sell component libraries for .NET development. WhatsUpGold is a network monitoring tool. Telerik Fiddler is an awesome thing they own that lets you inspect network traffic on a local machine by proxying everything.

Oh, they make WhatsUpGold? That actually gives me more confidence in them - it's been a simple but reliable monitoring tool that I've seen in enterprise use for many years.

Progress acquired Ipswitch/WhatsUp Gold in 2019 (https://investors.progress.com/news-releases/news-release-de...).

I use Fiddler (for web proxy debug) and Kendo UI (for Angular project) a lot at work. I had no idea they had other products

I didn’t know that Progress owns Fiddler. What an awesome tool!

Telerik bought Fiddler eight years ago, and then two years later Progress bought Telerik.

Ah that makes more sense.

Back in the day, Progress offered hands down the best platform for developing multi-user database-centric applications. They still sell it, but the product is now called OpenEdge and the company is called Progress (it used to be Data Language Corporation).

They have a lot of other products now as well.

Their website is marketing puff but the products are great.

OpenEdge is their DB. It has 1 storage engine but 2 ways to get to it: SQL and 4GL. If you write SQL, OpenEdge is relational DB. If you write 4GL, OpenEdge isn't relational unless you write relationship on application layer. Yeah, it's interesting.

4GL (aka ABL or Advanced Business Language) is the language that works best with OpenEdge. You write 4GL code, compile and deploy it to a specialized Tomcat environment called PASOE (Progress Application Server for Open Edge). It's their container to run 4GL apps.

WebSpeed is their middleware to serve APIs using 4GL code. Companies stuck in the desktop world are using WebSpeed to refactor their code and expose business logic to other languages through WebSpeed API middleware.

They acquired Telerik some time back. Those controls are used by .NET web devs and desktop devs. They are cool controls. I like them. Telerik controls are also integrated with their 4GL desktop environment. Kendo UI are tools/controls for the web and are pretty neat as well. Fiddler is also their product now.

DataDirect is a suite of connectors to make it easy for devs to connect between different DBs from 4GL, and for other languages to use DataDirect to connect to OpenEdge or call 4GL methods.

Corticon is their version of Dell Boomi or Alooma or Prismatic.io. It's a tool to run business processes with no code or low code. It's neat if you have tech savvy business analysts who like to use tools like that.

Sitefinity is their version of WordPress/Drupal/content frameworks. Sitefinity has its place.

NativeClient is their product to build mobile-first application across various platforms. They whipped up a neat app at their conference and it really worked well. Yes, it may have been cowboy-coded a bit, but it worked as intended.

Now they acquired Chef. I am sure there was a demand for orchestration within their client-base. They are making improvements steadily. They have a strategy. They have a niche target market, primarily in LATAM and EU and less so in North America. They do not have a great version control, static analysis, dynamic analysis, orchestration tools. Companies like Intuit and Fiserv seems to have built their own ecosystem around 4GL tools, but many companies just have primitive means of development with 4GL, still. Progress is trying to stay current. Their customers are much slower at adopting to changes in engineering; perhaps what they have just works for them. Not sure.

Acquiring chef is a good move. I've worked with their products for 2-3 years. It wasn't fun. I don't like 4GL. I'd like if Progress made SQL a first class citizen and invite PHP/Python/Ruby/etc. communities to write code against OpenEdge. From a business standpoint, I feel they are trying their best to stay modern and relevant. They are acquiring products that are indeed making their ecosystem cohesive.

I agree with this sentiment. The acquirer seems to be one of this enterprise companies that nobody hears about.

If you work in more traditional Windows-based IT, you know Progress. But yeah, they're not startup-y, it's unsurprising if the Silicon Valley crowd isn't familiar.

They are very well and truly entrenched in the enterprise application industry. I know a few medium-sized businesses that have maintained their Progress 4GL -> OpenEdge code for decades now.

That's because they are one of the companies that prints money by charging enterprises to do non-sexy things that startups don't find to be very interesting.