OpenEdge Advanced Business Language

OpenEdge Advanced Business Language, usually shortened to OpenEdge ABL, is a business application development language created and maintained by Progress Software Corporation. It is typically classed as a fourth-generation programming language and uses an English-like syntax meant to simplify the writing of business software. The language was known as PROGRESS or Progress 4GL up to version 9, and in 2006 the company renamed it to counter a presumed industry view that 4GLs were less capable than other languages. The original Progress 4GL was designed in 1981 as an architecture-independent language with an integrated database, so that people who knew their business but were not computer scientists could build applications, at a time when such software was often written in COBOL or C. ABL is strongly typed and late-bound. It began as a procedural language, and from version 10.1 it gained object-oriented grammar that can be mixed with the older procedural style. Data access is record based rather than set based, and a block of code can have a transaction scoped to it, so database changes are committed when it completes and undone if an error is raised. Programs can use the language with its own integrated relational database and tools.