Services are all the rage. The technical literature you read, the conferences you attend, the software tools you see advertised, all attest to this. Progress Software is no exception. We have talked to you (or possibly at you, to great extent) for several years now about the likely importance of software services to the future of your business and to your existing or planned OpenEdge business applications. We have added many features to our product set to support the uses that we expect and hope you will apply to developing and deploying services as a key part of your applications. We have extended the Progress product line beyond OpenEdge in several important ways, with products that in one way or another support software services and a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for software design, development, deployment, and management.

This paper is the first in a series to discuss the principles of building services in OpenEdge 10, and to provide examples of how to do this easily using the support for Web services and other features in the product.