Archive for June, 2010

CA Gen forums

This is one of those “announcement” sort of posts!

Should you have a question around CA Gen that you think that the general user community could answer, and want to use a “forum” style of interaction – where do you go ?

The obvious answer is the EDGE User Group – www.edgeusergroup.org – you can connect with the rest of the CA Gen world there.

The other main resource is the CA Communites Website – to which the EDGE forums will be migrating shortly – here .

Remember that you’ll have to sign up to post to either forum – they’re free and a great set of resources.

Note that the Gentalk.biz forums have been shut down and are no longer operating

EDIT: The content of the forum is still there – I’m just working on exporting it so we don’t lose it – it will find a home!

EGL up against CA Gen – no contest !!! :-)

I’ve noticed during the last few weeks a number of searches for EGL and CA Gen in the same search criteria on gentalk.biz. I thought that I’d investigate EGL and find out what the interest is all about.

It seems that EGL is a programming toolset by IBM which claims platform independence (much like CA Gen does).

SO – why would anyone want to migrate from EGL to CA Gen or (conversely) why would you want to migrate away from CA Gen to EGL ?

I don’t want to provide an exhaustive list of answers here, since that would take a VERY long post, but to state one particular reason, EGL is a coding language, whereas CA Gen is a “clicking” language.

Gen users will appreciate this. Even though EGL has syntax highlighting and code completion, YOU CAN STILL GET IT WRONG – but with CA Gen you can’t – since you don’t type the code you click it – the syntax cannot be wrong – both in terms of the CA Gen pseudo code and the generated code for the target platform.

Thanks for staying with me – I’m redesigning !

As stated – thanks for staying with me during the last few days – I’m revamping the look and feel of gentalk.biz !
I hope you like it and PLEASE feed any comments back to me about the new look – I think it’ll be more flexible and easy to update in the future as well as being a bit more modern-looking.

Feel free to comment on this post how it looks !

Thanks again – stay tuned !

EDIT: My download links in the media centre and download centre stopped working as part of the upgrade – they are now working again, so I can continue with the next steps of the upgrade process….

PSTEP Interface Designer

One of the new features in CA Gen r8 is the PSTEP Interface designer.
So – what does it do ?

In previous releases, it was possible, using the Web Service Wizard, to produce WSDL for CA Gen PSTEPs. The issue with this is that you were stuck with the CA Gen view names that you’d defined in the PSTEP import/export views.

The PSTEP Interface designer allows you to “sanitise” the view names and allow consuming processes of any technology to use names that are more relevant.

For example, an import view based around the “PRSN” entity, with attributes of “F_NAME” and “L_NAME” can now be exposed in your XML documents as

CUSTOMER.FORENAME and CUSTOMER.SURNAME

There’s no tie-in between your CA Gen views and what’s in your XML anymore. This means that years-old entity names can be exposed in “modern-speak” if you want – making it easier to define the services in words that the modern-day business understands.

There’s more to the PSTEP Interface Designer than that – keep tuned in for more !

To componentise or not ?

I have long postulated over componentisation (generally and within Gen) – I speak to people who evangelise about components and how they are a good thing, increasing productivity, flexibility and getting reuse out of your application assets in a controlled fashion.

I haven’t been particularly “into” components and CBD, preferring the traditional approach of utilising common code, as opposed to components.

One of the things that has always put me off investigating componentisation in more detail is that there seemed to be more management of “bits of stuff” required than “traditional” development. You had to have different models, specifications and implementations etc. whereas just a common action block would do, so, in my opinion, the amount of effort required to manage those “bits of stuff” outweighed the benefits of componentisation (rightly or wrongly!).

I therefore was surprised that I took a fresh look at componentisation – at CA World a couple of weeks ago, in the context of a workshop with IET and their new GuardIEn 8.0 product – when I wasn’t expecting to.

As a long-time GuardIEn user, I was aware of the fact that in a large-scale Gen site, you can’t do without it for model and configuration management, but stretch that a little further and get it to manage your “bits of stuff” in the CBD world. So – now the amount of effort required on the configuration management side of things is reduced/eliminated then the benefits of a component-based approach become more tangible.