This acquisition seems to fit in well with the general trend, although it is still unclear how Apptivity will articulate with the rest of the product line. One can't help but remember the Crescent acquisition in which there was expected to be a big cross-fertilization between Crescent's VBX tools and improvement of the Progress GUI, but very little came of that except to improve relationships with Microsoft, add some revenue to the bottom line, and to eventually produce a VP Product Marketing who seems to have had a positive effect. The correct URL is actually progress.com, by the way.
The interesting question is how will this articulate to the rest of the product, especially for those with existing applications. Merely connecting it to the Progress database might provide a reasonable tool for developing all-Java applications, but where does this leave existing VARs with a million lines of 4GL. Possibly they can migrate the business logic aspect of the 4GL to run on the server and use Apptivity as the means to a WUI client, but for virtually all existing VARs this would mean massive re-development since existing code is not structured for this kind of partitioned deployment. And, it tends to mean also having to develop a GUI client in some other technology unless one believes that it will be desirable to use a browser for everything, which I don't.
The other potentially promissing element here, although I don't know enough about Apptivity to know if this is appropriate, is that the server side of this product might inject some useful technology into Progress' AppServer technology. Currently, this technology is rather backward since it is synchronous only, single threaded, and is spawned by the client instead of being a named service. If they use the Apptivity server as a sort of hub connection which can run either Java or 4GL processes, one might get a leap forward in this area... although still with the re-write issues. |
