Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies®

Chapter 22. Progress with SOA

In This Chapter

• Making Progress

• The Progress SOA family

• Seeing what Progress has to offer

• Picture the Progress

• Starwood Hotels do SOA

In 1981, Joseph W. Alsop and several of his fellow MIT graduates founded Progress Software, a Massachusetts-based software company with over $400 million in 2005 revenue. The company initially focused on application and relational database development.

It turned out that one of Progress's first products included a language that made it easier for developers to create applications. This language, cleverly named Progress 4GL, was known as a fourth generation language, which meant that the computer commands were easier for programmers to understand than earlier, third generation languages such as COBOL. The company's early growth and success was predicated on its strategy of being in a better position to help software companies that wrote applications for specific industries.

Progress attracted a lot of software companies and software resellers as business partners as a result of this strategy. It found its niche partnering with companies that wrote software primarily for mid-size businesses. In the 1990s, as the client/server revolution unfolded, the company adapted its software environment to support this new technology approach. Therefore, the company was able to help its large base of partners adopt these more technically advanced technologies.

After Progress Software went public in the late 1980s, the company initiated an aggressive ...