You’ve been solving the same problem for years. You just didn’t know there was a better way.
You know the drill.
A new project kicks off. You need that utility library you wrote six months ago. So you do what everyone does: find the folder, copy the files over, and move on.
Three months later, a bug turns up in that library. You fix it. Then you remember: you’ve copied it into four other projects. You spend an afternoon tracking them all down. One of them you can’t even find anymore.
This is not a workflow. This is a slow fire.
It gets worse as you grow.
Large OpenEdge applications grow in a predictable way. Pieces of logic get duplicated across projects. Teams build the same helpers independently, unaware the work has already been done. Libraries drift out of sync. Refactoring becomes a negotiation with the past — every change ripples outward in ways you can’t fully trace.
And then there’s deployment. Updating a client means touching every project by hand. Configuration differences creep in. Something that works on one machine fails silently on another. Nobody is completely sure which version of which library is actually running in production right now.
The problem isn’t that your team is careless. The problem is structural. There is no standard way to declare what a project depends on. No single source of truth. No repeatable process for getting the right things in the right place.
Every other ecosystem solved this.
If you’ve spent any time outside the OpenEdge world, you already know what’s missing. Node developers type one command and every dependency their project needs appears, at the right version, in the right place. PHP developers do the same. Ruby. Go. Python. The tooling is so reliable it’s invisible.
OpenEdge developers copy files by hand and hope for the best.
That gap between what OpenEdge developers deserve and what they’ve had to put up with is exactly what we’ve been thinking about.
Something is coming..
We’ve been building a tool for Progress OpenEdge developers. Something that makes dependency management feel like it does in every other modern ecosystem. Something that lets you focus on the work instead of the plumbing.
We’re not ready to show everything yet. But we will be soon.
Its name is PackEdge. And it’s built to carry the weight.
Curious to learn more? Want early access for beta testing, or a walkthrough when it’s ready? Let us know — we’re listening.
Author: Valentin Duricu, Tech Lead
Vali is a web developer focused on building modern, responsive and user-friendly digital experiences with a strong attention to clean design and usability.
Outside of work, he enjoys art and travelling, finding inspiration in new places, people, and cultures.
