I came across an old advertising supplement for what was then “Composer by IEF” in CIO Magazine from April 1996 – that’s 14 years ago!
It makes a fascinating read – download it here.
Some of the phrases from the advert are still true of CA Gen today:
- Shortening the delivery life-cycle
- Internet application capability (yes! in 1996 !!!!)
- Break free from technology
- Repository- the essential enabler
OK – the names and capabilities of the tool may have changed and been extended, but that doesn’t stop the benefits from being there then and now.
The platforms that used to be supported in 1996 (Sequent, Digital AXP, WindowsNT, Informix and others) aren’t supported now, but some are (Oracle, DB2, CICS etc).CA Gen has allowed people to migrate off Digital AXP to Unix (say) with relative ease.
Some people ask me if I reckon that CA Gen is more productive or less productive than other tools and/or programming systems – well – where do I start!
Perhaps I need to start way back in 1990!
I stumbled across this graph which I’ve reproduced here. It’s from a copy of CIO Magazine in 1990 and stated even THEN that productivity with CA Gen (then called IEF) is 2-1 or even 10-1 times that of traditional mechanisms for software development (or – in this case maintenance).
For a tool to have retained that level of productivity for the last 20 years is impressive.
Now I need to find a graph like this from 2010 !
Following on from the last post on the JCUG, it has some really great case studies on what CA Gen can do. The case studies are in Japanese, but they focus on how CA Gen helped large organisations in many sectors – banking, insurance and government – update or migrate their systems – many including multi-platform migrations.
They range from mainframe to client/server moves, through to generation for the web and show the versatility of CA Gen.
Don’t forget that they are in Japanese so you’ll need to translate them first !
I just stumbled across the Japan CA Gen User Group web site.
If any one can help me out in translating it I’d be grateful, since the “normal” translators (google translate etc etc) don’t seem to work and there appears to be a lot of useful content contained within the site.
UPDATE: If you use Google’s Chrome browser the content seems to be translated OK – you can register here
In order to lower the Total Cost of Entry to the CA Gen world (let’s face it – it IS quite pricey !!), I’d wondered if the Open Source Visual Studio “clone” Mono could be used to compile up Windows and Linux Gen-generated C code.
As far as I can see (support aside) it should be possible to compile and run GUI clients using the compilers – I’ve yet to try this but hope to do so in the near future.
However, I have had success compiling C proxies with GNU C – they run without issue – so I am hopeful about using Mono – has anyone tried this or be willing to have a stab ?
