Archive for September, 2008

Jumar in the news again!

A further appointment at Jumar Solutions (read here) !!!

I have known Andy (as have many other Genners) for a number of years and can only add to the superlatives that have been bestowed on him!

His presence in Jumar will be an incredible asset to them – congratulations to both !

Europe + Australia = ?

We read this week of the alliance between jumar-articles/article.php?paper=44″>Jumar Solutions (in the UK) and Facet in (Australia).

Such alliances are common within this industry and this one in particular will (I think!!) bring benefits (obviously) to both companies, but, to us “users” the benefits are (again – in MY opinion) even bigger.

Jumar’s solutions have allowed many organisations to complete projects that they would not have been able to unless the experience of Jumar and their unique tools were there behind them.

Facet also have long experience of Gen, participating in many large projects with Gen, so are aware of the challenges that it presents.

So – what IS the benefit going to be for the users ?

Well – get any 2 people who know a subject in-depth (or are acknowledged experts in a specific field) in a room and let them talk for an hour – then see what comes out!

So – Jumar and Facet – acknowledged experts in their fields and who know their subjects inside-out .

There will, no doubt, be more to come from these two companies – but in the first instance, both will be able to bring their individual skills to each other’s marketplace, creating a gobal availability for extremely skilled Gen resouces.

Increased availability of skilled resources is VERY definitely a great thing for the Gen arena! – Long may it continue.

Get Gen Village news in your newsreader

Regular visitors to the Gen Village will know that there is a facitlity for them to directly post news and other snippets to the Gentalk.biz site. Now, there is a way to disseminate that information to the wider community and keep up to date with the activities within the Gen Village – the new Gen Village RSS feed.

The feed is displayed on the Gentalk.biz website and is also available in-world.

Now this is available to you. Simply use the http://news.genvillage.gentalk.biz url in your newsreader and that’s it !

If you want to be part of the Gen Village community and post directly to the Gentalk.biz site, thereby being part of Gentalk.biz, email info@gentalk.biz for a bracelet – as shown highlighted in red in the picture.

Exit Stage Left – but why ?

FACT: There are a number of companies who provide application migration services.
FACT: Companies will migrate your application(s) away from Gen to COBOL/C etc if you want.

WHY ?
I have never understood this! Since becoming exposed to Gen in the mid-1990′s I have always seen the benefit of modelling and code generation and deployment in the same toolset.

Quite why any organisation would want to return to hand-crafting code for enterprise-scale applications is beyond me.

As I see it, any benefits that once might have been gained by manual coding in a high level language will be washed away by a Model Based Development approach like Gen, with its productivity and platform independence.

I really would like to understand the thought processes that go into a decision to remove Gen from an organisation’s estate – perhaps some readers of this can enlighten me by posting comments!

MMMMMmmmm – Gen -> Java or Java?

Some questions:

Q1) Should organisations who want to transform their business use Java ?

A1) Yes – why not?

Q2) How should organisations transform their business with Java ?

A2) MMMMmmmm – choices – choices – choices….
The result of this choices issue is that an organisation could choose to migrate their existing applications (maybe mainfame green-screen) directly to hand-crafted Java code, or maybe use a toolset to do this (such as those from Metex and FreeSoft among others).

These tools are no doubt successful and have good track records. BUT what happens 5 years hence, and there is a “new” Java – whatever will be “strategic” then – let’s say “.Net” ?

Another migration, along with all the training and so on that a project of that sort requires ? Yup – that’s reality!

If the organisation had chosen to migrate the application into Gen at the outset, then when the new strategy comes along, the organisation simply deploys into that technology instead.

The costs of migrating to Gen may be higher at the start, but over time, the benefits of technology independance will outweigh them.

This is already well know among the Gen community, but less well publicised outside of it.