Archive for February, 2008

CA Gen Webcast on New Tools for Automated QA and Model Verification

Join CA and IET for an informative discussion on new automated QA and model verification tools for your enterprise.  This webcast discusses a life-cycle management approach for CA Gen consisting of tools & techniques that facilitate change & configuration management, auditing, links to enterprise Change Control Management (CCM) and now automated QA / model verification.

Learn how these tools will benefit you with

• Improved quality of applications because of the automated model verification and automated model management and build processing
• Improved auditing, compliance and control from the change control features and links to enterprise CCM tools
• Improved productivity from the automation of code checking, impact analysis and automated builds.

I would encourage ALL gentalk.biz readers to sign up to this webcast. The combination of CA-Gen and IET’s tools make Gen a powerful force in software development. The link to sign up to this webcast on 11th March 2008 at 9am EST is here.

COBOL to Gen to UML Capabilities

Following on from the 3rd Gathering’s dicussion on UML to Gen mapping, here’s a more comprehensive list of the comparisons between the UML concepts and Gen’s concepts.

Looking further, not only is there a list of comparisons, but it must be remembered that these are actively in development by the Arikan Productivity Group (APG) as part of the ModelCVS toolset

datX and Legacy Renewal are the first two components of the ModelCVS toolkit which are already commercially available.The Metamodeling Toolkit will be next, followed by the Java generation component and UML2 diagrams for Gen, as indicated in the link above.

It seems that there is a tide of opinion that UML is becoming increasingly required in systems development, therefore, we need some way of getting UML diagrams and Gen models to interchange information with one another. ModelCVS really does fit the bill. It is a complete toolkit to take the legacy-type systems – COBOL and PL/1 and transfer them to Gen models and provide the supporting UML to describe those systems. Now we know how powerful Gen can be once it has a model in its’ grasp ! Toolkits like this add value to your organisation than you can possibly imagine – the alternative is ditching your old systems and rewriting them from scratch – ModelCVS’s wizard-based approach makes it easy to do…..

ModelCVS is really worth checking out if you have older legacy-type systems that need to be renewed – the target of that renewal will be Gen and then you can take advantage of all that power!

Gathering 3 Resources

Don’t forget to download these resources from Gathering 3

• Gathering 3 eBook(downloaded times)
• Powerpoint Presentation Slides (downloaded times).
• Audio (downloaded times), or play it here:

  Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

• Video (downloaded times) – it’s around 15Mb in size – be patient!

and take a look at the slides,

and the pictures !

Should Gen support MySQL ?

MySQL has is roots in the open source movement, not unlike Linux, and has become a major player in the RDBMS marketplace, used by many of the world’s largest coprorations, and powering many vast internet sites – Wikipedia, for example.

It also has powerful enterprise-class features, such as clustering, replication, XA support, and stored procedures – this makes it a potential choice for large enterprises. In fact, a Gartner paper states:

“MySQL is capable of supporting clusters, delivering atomic, consistent, isolated and durable (ACID) functionality and handling some mission-critical applications. Evaluate MySQL as an alternative to IBM DB2, Oracle and other DBMSs.”

Since Sun’s purchase of MySQL, which, arguably has legitimised the MySQL product, would it make sense for it to be considered as a potentially supported database for CA-Gen, especially as many Linux users are to be found to using it, and since we now have Linux server support………

NOT supporting it would maybe risk alienating Linux users.

Gathering 3 – Gen and UML

Don’t forget the 3rd Virtual Gen Gathering 8pm GMT UK time 20th Feb.2008 – see the Gathering page for more information.
If you are attending, don’t forget, that the presentation is in voice chat – so you’ll need to get Second Life preferences working. If any of the attendees can’t pick up the voice chat, I’ll do the presentation in normal text chat, so no-one misses out. The discussion afterwards will be in “normal” text chat.