Archive for August, 2007

EDGEucate 2007 – Advance Programme available – download now !

What will you do at EDGEucate 2007 ?

• Participate in more than 20 technical session and several Vendor Presentations that will keep you on top of the industry’s latest trends.
• Discuss specific software needs with an impressive panel of company representatives at the EDGEucate Trade Show.
• Network with your peers during the event and at the Tuesday Night Reception, sharing experiences and tips with fellow CA Gen users
• Sign up to become an EDGE volunteer and foster the growth of this unique association!

See the CA-Gen’s most respected users, customers and CA partner vendors in a fantastic setting – Southfork Ranch made famous by JR and the rest of the “Dallas” cast in the 1980′s !

Download the advance program and registration details -

Click here for Hotel details

Don’t forget

EDGE EMEA 2007 in Ditton Park, London

September 30th – October 2nd 2007

3rd-party Generators for Gen

Thinking about my previous post where I alluded to a potential for there being Ruby support in a future version of Gen, I stumbled upon a possible way forward for Gen to be an even bigger tool than it actually is …..

Since the new versions of Gen are going to be Eclipse-based i.e. based on a freely available framework – which sort of builds upon the current developer trend for adapting frameworks for use with plug-ins, what if there were a published “Gen Generator” API into which 3rd party generators could be produced?

 This would reduce the time to market for new languages and frameworks to be supported, whilst still giving CA the chance to market the tool and the superb encyclopedias for code repositories.

Look at the success tools like GuardIEN have had – no-one uses the native Gen tools anymore to migrate and control versions – nearly all the big sites use GuardIEN – but this has not reduced CA’s marketing collateral in terms of selling Gen licenses !

If publishing an API for the generators, or a plugin-style architecture could be considered, then many more languages and frameworks could be supported by development teams (either in the freeware, or open source or commercial spaces) as well as by CA themselves.

Potential candidates for generators could be Ruby, other .NET languages that appear, Python (possibly for smaller systems). Additionally, generators for different platforms (still C, COBOL etc etc) could be produced in this way.

Of course, there will still be support issues to consider, but potentially if a good generator for, say, C on a MacOS platform were to be developed, or possibly a Symbian OS target, then it could be adopted by CA as a de-facto and supported.

I suppose what I am saying is that by splitting the product up into the developer interface and a back-end generator, the people that build generators could be used as “incubators” to add to the target platforms later on when the generators are formally adopted …..

This could only strengthen the “write once, deploy many” argument that IS Gen !

Perception or Rejection?

I don’t know about the readers of this blog, or any other Gen users, but I have the perception among the general computing community that Gen is perceived to be “old”.

This is true – Gen is “old” but with age comes wisdom !

COBOL is “mature” but there are more lines of COBOL out there than anything else, but that does not make it “old”!

 I believe that in the computing community, the term “old” had negative connotations – “old” means that it is “no good”. “Mature” on the other hand means that it (whatever “it” is) has been through thorough testing, and had a few releases to iron out all the problems.

Languages like Java on the other hand, are seen as “mature” despite only being around for 10 years – languages like the upstart Ruby are seen as cutting edge. Cutting edge these days seems to be synonymous with “better” but I would argue that “new is not necessarily best”. With a total system like Gen, whilst it has been around for a few years (putting it firmly in the mature camp) it has also innovated with each and every release (some more than others) and it has kept on adding new features – surely this puts it somewhere toward cutting edge ?

My point is that because Gen has been around for some time, it should be trusted by organisations that need a mature, stable development platform, but should excite the generation of developers that need to be seen to be at the leading edge of development.

But this is not the case ! Why ?

I believe that it is because of the fact that gen has a “mature” status in the industry, much like COBOL, or any mainframe skills these days – show me a developer that would choose a green-screen COBOL development environment over a PC-based IDE with online help and interactive, colour coded syntax highlighting !

So the fact that Gen has been seen as mature for some years is a good thing from organisations wanting stability, but a bad thing in terms of attracting young developers to the toolset.

How do we fix it ?

The fact that with recent developments, the tool has been making inroads into using Eclipse should help – but possibly making it support something like Ruby sooner rather than later (Ruby is seen possibly as a next-generation Java by some). It may be that Ruby is not considered mature for industrial-scale systems yet, but then again, Java wasn’t considered scalable until a few years ago, but it is now.

So, then we come back to the argument that mature is best !

Upgrading CA Gen 103: Best Practices

Register here for this CA webcast in which a customer discusses his experiences with Gen and upgrading in a particularly difficult environment. There is much to be learnt from others’ experiences. a 45 minute webcast originally broadcast on 19th July 2007,it takes an in-depth look at the best practices for executing your CA Gen r7.6 release upgrade.