Archive for January, 2009

Network Dinner @ Wembley

On Thursday night I went (as a guest of Jumar Solutions), to the fabulous Wembley Stadium in London.

The Network Dinners are a great way to meet other Gen practitioners on an intimate basis and discuss the issues of the day, alongside a presentation.

After a tour of the stadium (which is enormous!), where we got the chance to see behind the scenes, in the England changing rooms, go through the tunnel on to the pitch and hear about the history of both the old and the new stadiums (see the pictures below) , we returned to the comforts of the corporate box, some fantastic food and a presentation from Rob Jasper of Schuitema NL, a retailler in Holland on revitalising their 3270 Gen application and the benefits they received from it.

Schuitema used Jumar’s Project Phoenix tools and methods to take their existing 3270 application (store and stock management) and componentise it and layer it such that future changes could be made easier and quicker. They also changed the paradigm from 3270 to the web which allowed them to use other channels such as PDA’s to access the Gen back-end server components.

Using tools like Project Phoenix and CA-Gen allows organisations to levarage existing codebases (which are, after all, an asset) and keep deriving value from them many years after other tools’ value has diminished.

Thanks to Jumar for the hospitality, Rob for the insight into what he does and the other Genners at the event for stimulating, interesting conversation.

Response Systems enters the Gen Village

On Wednesday 4th February Tuesday 27^th January at 9:00 PM UK time, at the Gen Village, there will be a session from Response Systems on its new QA Console software. The one hour presentation will show how the QA Console integrates into Response Systems’ existing browser software – Access Gen – and will also reveal the basic encyclopedia principles behind developing your own Custom QA Checks within the QA Console framework. All you need to attend is the Second Life software and your own online avatar. Visit http://gathering.gentalk.biz/ for further information and instructions on how to join this growing online community.

For further details on how the QA Console can be used to develop your own complete QA Solution leveraging your current in-house Gen skills without reliance on third parties, visit http://www.response-systems.com/solutions/qa/ or email info@response-systems.com.

Gen – 1st Impressions

I asked a colleague who had never seen Gen before to write his impressions and post them here ——-

“Well, I’ve seen it so what do I think?

Having had a background in programming without the aid of some bells-n-whistle IDE or rainbow coloured syntax GUI editor, When Gen was first described to me by someone obviously very passionate about it I decided to appear interested but deep down remained a little sceptical, after all they say love is blind?

In fact I very quickly realised how ‘useful’ this environment is (I’m referring to ‘useful’ as NOT being the ability to change background colours into one of a thousand different shades, or use some fancy font first discovered by a 5 year olds first experience with a crayon). NO, I mean really useful… it provides the ability to ‘see’ very quickly how the application being analysed/designed/developed/supported is connected. My first delve into the model and the ability to see the direction the code took calling or being called when trying to understand program flow, brought an instant smile to my face. At times, when trying to find one’s way around coded modules, it can be like looking for a needle in the wrong haystack… but this was something different.

I’ve yet to use Gen in earnest, but a quick go at producing some code from the model soon had me trying to hide shouts of ‘wow’, instead choosing to mutter it under my breath, after all I didn’t want to sound too keen.

So in conclusion??? Well I wouldn’t say it was the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen, but I quickly reminded myself of the phrase ‘all frills and no knickers’!! My scepticism has taken a dent since seeing the Gen Toolset in operation, as this is something that has real and tangible benefits for the entire life-cycle. It’s clever, clean, efficient and smart enough to know that humans aren’t perfect, even if we like to think we are.”

Network Dinner

Thursday of this week sees me attending the first London-based Gen Network dinner hosted by Jumar Solutions, in the palatial surroundings of the new Wembley Stadium. Its a chance for UK-based (especially London-based) Gen people to get together and chat about the tool and its development and meet up with old friends. The speaker this time is Rob Jasper of Schuetema,  Holland based retailer who are a large Gen user.

Of course I will put a write up about it and maybe some pictures too !

Downloads back again

I did some digging around in the logs and found that a single IP address had downloaded as single PDF document in excess of 500 times !

I cant be sure that this was malicious or not, but I disabled downloads for 2 days. Now, downloads are back.

Once again – I apologise for any issues that this incident has caused….

Happy downloading.