What is the product offering of Progress? Quickly went through the website.. not sure, but it sounds more like smoke and mirrors..
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 ..
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.
[[muffled screaming]]
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.
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.
They have a lot of other products now as well.
Their website is marketing puff but the products are great.
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.