Dear Progress Developers, DBAs, and Architecture Administrators,

There has been some conversation of late in the community about the ABL and today's business environment. To help answer some questions, I have put together a quick survey to ask the marketplace some questions. At the end, I have an area where you can expand the survey with your own comments.

The results will be shared by collating the information and not including any specific information to any one company or person. Please include your contact information in the last question for me to send it along to.

Amduus Information Works, Inc. is working at capacity. We are not considering new customers at this time. Existing customers are welcome to continue submitting new projects of course!

Witherbees Market & Deli are instituting a survey of the market in the downtown area of Flint. If you live or work in the area, please take it at http://survey.amduus.com/bee/.

Amduus Information Works, Inc. is proud to aid fellow Flint, Michigan businesses get a start.

There was some conversation on the peg (www.peg.com) about logging tools. Attached is the tool I spoke of which is a static class that can be used at any point in execution to send a request for a log.

See the unit test code for examples of use.

The book Progress ABL/4GL Programming Standards book published by Amduus contains mention of some commenting blocks used for specific purposes.

The comment blocks can be seen and cut & pasted from here.

A podcast with Mark Carges of eBay discussing the history of eBay's and Pay Pal's APIs and how they came to be a thing of their own.

A good way to stir thoughts of new income opportunities learning other's APIs or creating your own!

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4098.html

It has been noted that once something is on the internet, it is there forever. Apparently, this is somewhat wrong for certain types of information. The Progress E-Zine collection continues to be available on the internet, but often it is tucked away in corners that are hard to find.

With this in mind, a three volume set of the E-Zines in bound printed form are now available. No more binders full of printer paper versions of the monographs, simply reach into the book shelf for the bound copy and enjoy.

The books can be purchased from these locations:

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/progress-e-zine-collection-vo...

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/progress-e-zine-collection-vo...

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/progress-e-zine-collection-vo...

In the SaaS world, often customers will want their own customizations into the source code specific to how they want to do business with your software.

Here is a point where object oriented programming stands out. By crafting your programming in such a way that basic functionality is enhanced - you can use different classes specific to particular customers for enhanced implementation.

Since we are going to potentially be using one of multiple classes, we need to have an interface describing the methods available in the class.

Standards are present to attempt to implement goals.

The goals for these standards are:

Code readability. Readable code is maintainable code. Readable code is quality code.

Ease of maintainability. Maintainability is important for customer relations and quality. A defect should always be easy to identify and fix.

Ease of extension. It should be easy to add new features to the software.

A lot of software development is oriented to what happens after the sale. As anyone knows these days - the problem is getting money in the front door!

With so many people having high speed connections - whether on their PC or cell phone - the use of video to introduce and inform on a product is now here! Electronic catalogs should be updated so that not only is there a textual description - but one can actually see the use of the more complex products.