Archive for 2008

Gen 7.6 support

Check out this link https://support.ca.com/irj/portal/anonymous/phpsupcontent?contentID=187514 - it should be accessable to all – Gen 7.6 is supported until 2012 – gives us some breathing space to upgrade !

Gen Training System Demonstration

The next Gathering will be on 17th December 2008 at 9pm UK Time within the Gen Village in Second Life.

The focus this time will be on the in-world training system which can be used by all users of the Gen community to deliver short, subject-specific training courses.

The training system is easy to use, administer and control, and allows targetted training within the Gen community.

It struck me that there was no mechanism for the Gen community to have short, one-hour training courses on VERY detailed technical subjects that would be lost in amongst other, larger, longer training courses, so I developed the in-world training suite.

The training suite can be used to deliver free or paid-for training – so why not come along next Wednesday and see for yourself !

Registering for this event either below or in-world will also enrol you as a student in the Gen Academy and you will be automatically signed up to the demonstration course which will mean you will receive personalised training materials in your in-box.

Design by Contract

Many people now are considering “Design by Contract” – where both sides (service provider and service consumer) agree on some WSDL before any coding of the services and/or consuming application takes place.

Then, both sides go away and design and build their respective components in parallel before coming together again later to test the interfaces and so on.

It strikes me that Gen doesn’t adhere to this way of thinking as yet, but how cool would it be if designers could choose to construct some WSDL “in the middle” and feed it to a developer on either side of the consumer/servicer fence (either or both could be Gen developers), and tooling could construct skeleton code into which developers plug the functionality.

Having this tooling in place would maximise the productivity of a Gen developer, since they could import a piece of WSDL ready to have the “gaps” filled in – a bit like crafting an EAB “user written code inserted here” but based around sensible standards.

What do you think ?

Automatic for the people

Modern large organisations need to be able to control complex software deployments using industrial-strength configuration managament and distribution tools.

It follows, then that in a heterogeneous environment consisting of Gen components and non-Gen components, there are parts of the Gen lifecycle that need to be automated – this includes code generation and building.

For the most part, Gen can work in this arena, as most of the generators (encyclopedia-based, anyway) have CLI (command line interfaces).  This works fine for online, batch, and client/server packaged components. Other types of packaging are not so controllable.

Once the code is generated, the compilation is usually straightforward enough to automate.

For Gen to be truly “Automatic for the People” (apologies to Mr. Stipe!) ALL types of packaging need to be controlled by the command line as well as though the toolset.

Staying between the lines

Gen is a multi-platform tool, and to take maximum advantage of this, when designing applications with the tool, it must be remembered that at some stage your application may need to be replatformed onto other hardware operating systems.

What this means in practice is that probably 99% of the Gen components will be deployable to the new platform with little if no issue, but as soon as EABs are introduced, the risk that there will be significant effort involved in replatforming those components. This goes for custom middleware implementations, and modified build scripts.

All of these aspects serve to increase the effort required to replatform a Gen application and also reduce the value that might have been gained by using Gen in the first place.

It has to be said, that there are things that Gen simply can’t do, so implementing those in EABs is obviously the only way to go, but be sensible in how this is done – don’t use operating system specific calls if at all possible, for example.

“Staying between the lines” and using as much pure Gen as possible is rather like using motorways/autobahn/freeways etc to get to your destination – well marked, easy to see and understand.

Try using “B-roads” or farm tracks (akin to using custom code and bespoke code in EABs) and the map is less clear and you will probably take longer and get more and more frustrated…..