CircleCI vs. Progress OpenEdge

CircleCI is perfect for a CI/CD pipeline for an app using a standard build process. It'll take more work for a complex build process, but should still be up to the task unless you need a lot of integrations with other tools. If you have a big team and can spare someone to focus full time on just the CI/CD tools, maybe something like Jenkins is better, but if you're just looking to get your app built, tested, and delivered without a huge amount of effort, CircleCI is probably your preferred tool.

Incentivized

I have had limited exposure to other development environments, but I have found Openedge to be well suited for the purposes that we are using it for. We have a windows client-server application that has been in use for over 20 years and has held it's age well. We also have a web based product using openedge appserver to access our backend code. The appserver functions well and we have been happy with it

Incentivized

• Multiple builds can be run at the same time in parallel.
• The CircleCI web interface (UI/UX) is very easy to understand and use.
• Easy Configuration to learn and use. Just a single configuration YAML file.
• Many integrations. We use the GItHub, Slack, and DataDog integrations.

Incentivized

• Openedge databases are practically bulletproof, even when shot down abnormally. The offer complete transaction scoping, before imagining, and also after imaging for roll foward capability.
• Openedge has a very powerful and easy to learn 4GL programming language that can be used in a traditional or object oriented manner.
• Openedge also has powerful web services components, fully integrating both SOAP and RESTful web services.
• Openedge is completely scaleable from 1 user to a fully distributed global enterprise solution.

Incentivized

• The "phases" their config file uses to separate out options seem very arbitrary and are not very helpful for organizing your config file
• No way that I know of to configure which version of MongoDB you use. You have to write your own shell script to download and start MongoDB if you want a specific version.
• Hard to access build artifacts in the UI

Incentivized

• Needs to improve the documentation
• Licensing is costly

This language used since 1980

CircleCI interface is awesome in that it is relatively modern and makes it clear exactly which parts of the engineering lifecycle you are in

Incentivized

It's pretty snappy, even with using workflows with multiple steps and different docker images. I've seen builds take a long time if it's really involved, but from what I can tell, it's still at least on par if not faster than other build tools.

Incentivized

Unless you have a reasonably large account, you're going to be mainly stuck reading their documentation. Which has improved somewhat over the years but is still extremely limited compared to a platform like Digital Ocean who invested in the documentation and a community to ensure it's kept up to date. If you can't find your answer there, you can be stuck.

Incentivized

Circle was the first CI with simple setup, great documentation, and tight integration with GitHub. Using Jenkins was too much maintenance and overhead, TeamCity was limited in how we could customize it and run concurrent builds, TravisCI was not available for private repos when we switched.

Incentivized

The decision to use openedge with our particular product was made such a long time ago that I certainly was not around to make the decision. And most of the other products that would have been compared at the time are likely no longer around. Which does speak to the longevity and benefits of this product. When you look back and see how long the same product has been going forward with constant improvements and remaining relevant without major disruptive changes, it is worthy of some credit.

Incentivized

• It has eased the burden of standardizing our testing and deployment, making onboarding new developers much faster, and having to fix deployment mistakes much less often.
• It allows us to focus our process around the GitHub workflow, ignoring the details of whatever environment the thing we're working on is actually hosted in. This saves us time.

Incentivized

• Openedge is a good business partner. They provide excellent support, education, and marketing assistance.
• Openedge programming resources are readily available, both in the US and inexpensively overseas when additional staff is needed to complete projects.
• Openedge is just as powerful, but much less expensive than its rivals, like Oracle.

Incentivized