Archive for July, 2009

Breaking News: Vendor Services Agreement

Jumar Solutions is the first Global Vendor Services partner to sign with CA - extending the reach of CA using partners globally – read the press release here.

Gen r8 opens for beta

Gen R8 is open for public beta testing – for more information as to how you can participate in the program – go here.

Make it what we need it to be !

Gen gathers momentum with Mainframe 2.0

As we’ve heard from CA previously, and noted here, the Mainframe 2.0 initiative has been launched successfully and is gathering momentum and press coverage (ComputerWorldUK and z/Journal).

Mainframe 2.0′s Mainframe Software Manager is written in CA-Gen – which shows the committment that CA have to Gen and its future – basing their future strategy of their own products, created by their own products !

More Mainframe 2.0 means more Gen out there (albeit under the covers) – but Gen’s been under the covers, beavering away in mission-critical systems for years – no difference there !

Ease of use

A colleague has just mentioned how easy it is to perform impact assessments using the Gen as compared to other languages and environments.

He was, admittedly, using GuardIEn to perform some “where used” type reports – but remarked that he had used other development tools in the past (VB, COBOL etc) and struggled to get the level of productivity when assessing small changes in those environments that he got from Gen!

This is because the code is stored in models which can be searched – what other technology does that !

API work

I’ve been tweeting over the last few days about the Encyclopedia API and how I’ve tried to start to work with it.

I have to say it is a comprehensive API, the best bit being that you can use pretty much the same calls on a CSE as a HE as a set of .dat files – so you can test your code on a local model (in effect, a throwaway) without damaging the core code in the CSE or HE.

But with complexity comes difficulty and danger – its possibly to completely corrupt your model when using the API – so I’m going to take care – however I’m not going to be using the update API – just the read-only API – so I should be safe….. shouldn’t I ????