UK & Ireland CA Gen Users Day Review

CA‘s Hurriyet Giray’s presentation kicked off the day – she explained the vision that CA have for Gen, and its place in CA’s strategy, and the commitment that they have placed in the product due to its inclusion as the very bedrock of Mainframe 2.0. Not just concentrating the extended value of Gen, she illustrated some of the new features and the enhancements made in the toolset to prepare for larger, more dynamic changes in the future, such as CICS web services. She also provided feedback from the Partner Advisory Summits recently held in London and Plano – real interaction between the customers and CA is shaping the content of future CA Gen releases.

Jumar‘s Dan Hobbs’ presentation was a light-hearted look at one of the more serious aspects of model-based-development – what happens when your model gets corrupted? He explained what model corruptions are, in the context of a simple example, and then proceeded to illustrate the concepts, and the answers to the problems with some concrete examples. Much of the corruptions that happen are benign, and Jumar has experience of what these are, however, some can cause untold damage, but Jumar has tools to identify and fix these issues.

John Gymer from IET spoke of many approaches to parallel development, model management and the best approaches to take depending on your requirements. His presentation provided food for thought in that many of the existing Gen sites have a model management structure which hasn’t been re-evaluated for a long time, since “it just works”. John’s words will prompt many people to consider just how many models they need and what environments they are to support, and vice versa.

John also launched IET 7.8 – the new updates to their tooling.

Virtualisation is a relatively new technology to the marketplace – Response Systems have seized the initiative and assessed what use it can be within the Gen environment. They have used it to evaluate new versions of Gen by creating images of PC’s with the Gen toolset installed and deployed them on target PC’s. Since images do not interact with the host PC, and therefore do not damage or change it, it can be destroyed after use.

They have also experienced the downside of virtualisation – the fact that memory is now the critical factor, as well as network bandwidth. They have realised that careful planning can enable virtualisation to assist greatly in their work.

Orjan from CSN’s presentation was an enlightened look at how they went about understanding CA’s commitment to Gen. They visited the labs and spoke to the developers, understood the impact Mainframe 2.0 has had on the r8 release of Gen, and come to the conclusion that CA’s vision for Gen is slowly evolving toward one which they are comfortable with, and therefore, have decided to invest in Gen for the medium-to-long term.

CA‘s Dalia Soliman provided a LIVE audio and video demonstration from CA’s labs in Plano of how easy it will be in r8, to take a web service generated by Gen, now with no requirement for proxies! and consume it within a Dreamweaver HTML page.

The demo went well, showing how a service defined by a piece of XML can be generated from Gen and called from a page designed outside the toolset. At the moment, the interaction (at the design time) is handled by a Dreamweaver plugin, and (presumably) more will be available later for other web application design tools.

Lastly, Paul Hughes from Jumar focused on the planning, planning, planning and more planning that you need to undertake in any transformation and modernisation project! To enable you to understand how to get where you want to be – be it CBD, 3270 to GUI, or GUI to WUI, there needs to be a lot of planning, starting with understanding where you are now. Paul likened it to a SATNAV-type journey, where the first thing the SATNAV system does before giving you directions to where you want to go, is work out where it is! – after all, to get directions to a place, you need to know where you’re starting from…

For a downloadable PDF, with extra photographs, click here - just wait for the video !