The Future of CA Gen – evolution/revolution – 10 points to Utopia part 1
With the up and coming
CA World 2010 in May, and the run-up to the release of
CA Gen r8, it’s time to think about the future of CA Gen and what it will become.
There are development challenges out there that CA Gen clearly meets, but what about those that it doesn’t, and what about other tools that do ? Where does CA Gen “fit in” and what should CA Gen be doing to “fit in” with today’s modern development challenges ?
I thought that I should lay down some thoughts for further discussion within these pages – so feel free to comment as you like on the first 5 ideas…
First: Framework support – we should get CA Gen to support popular frameworks, so generated application components could be framework-agnostic, which can then be specialised for different target frameworks. Those frameworks could include:
- Clouds (Azure, Amazon etc)
- Java frameworks (Spring, STRUTS etc)
Each emergent framework could have a new “specialisation SDK” which could take the framework-agnostic code and “turn it into” a framework specific set of code.
Second: Deployment platforms – there are a plethora of new development platforms out there that CA Gen should natively support:
- iPhone
- Android
- WindowsMobile
- Blackberry
Third: The toolset should be able to “communicate” or “be integrated” with other tooling of a similar nature and exchange metadata
Fourth: Communications should be open – make the Gen servers available to be accessed by any technology. Using XML as a way of opening up those servers means that then any communications middleware (e.g. MQ, Tuxedo etc) could be used to access the data. Other technologies could then seamlessly use the Gen servers with no proprietary technology like Transaction Enabler.
Fifth: The tooling needs to be based around Eclipse – a move in that direction has already been made with CA Gen 7.6 and the upcoming r8
Points 6 thru 10 coming soon…. watch this space…..
EDIT: Since I posted this on Monday of this week, traffic has significantly increased ! Don’t forget you can comment on this, and every post – you don’t need to register or login to comment – It’ll be great to get your views – that’s what Gentalk’s for !
[...] aluded to this in the past here , here , here ,here and here - so I’ve been muttering about this for a while now – the [...]
Whilst I agree that the move to Eclipse is a significant move for CA Gen (using Gen Studio), I believe that an even more significant move is to support additional platforms – such as the mobile platforms described. This can be done by importing additional Java classes relevant to that platform. The SDK for Blackberry, for example is Java-based; since CA Gen can target Java, it shouldnt be too difficult to add the Blackberry-specific components. This is also true of the Android platform.
Moves should be made to extend CA Gen’s capabilities into compatibility with other tooling – in these days of mix’n'match – CA Gen should allow exchange of metadata with other standards-based tools
I think, CA Gen Studio is a very important extension for CA Gen. With CA Gen Studio the models can be brought into Eclipse environment. The missing work is exactly what ProgGen does. This is the conversion of CA Gen model to an Ecore based metamodel instance. The JMMI classes enable direct access to CA Gen models without wrapping C API’s within Java Classes. The Code transformation must be an integral part of CA Gen such that the other systems easily can be transferred to CA Gen models. The code completion editor is with JMMI very easy to accomplish. Framework support is also given using eclipse, ProgGen generates struts based web apps. Using ProgGen UML can be used, or any other language can be used instead of CA Gen pseudo code(on the fly transformation into CA Gen model with ProgGen). Java can directly be used to program parts of CA Gen applications. CA Gen can be described as state-of-the art tool. The most important usage is as far as I am concerned the modeling capability with i.e UML and the parts which are not supported by UML like screen descriptions and maybe action diagramming can be done in CA Gen. Is this not a enhancement against only eclipse? And if you consider eclipse as the state of the art environment, CA Gen with eclipse is better than only eclipse. Compared with .Net CA Gen with eclipse is also better than .Net. For example JBoss can be used in eclipse as J2EE server, such that Web apps can easily be generated and run.