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.
Gen is in ist last stages of its lifecycle? The vision doc (on this site) is written in 2007!! More and more company’s are converting Gen build apps to other platform’s. Usergroups are more dead than alive? Gen is a great tool more 4GL and closer to I-case than EGL but. . . . .
The focus of CA is not particularly on development tools like Gen.
IBM-Rational on the other hand is development tooling all the way.
EGL is growing. Conversion of Gen to other platforms is done other way around I was unable to find.
So convince me why it would be a good thing to stick with Gen.
So convince me otherwise.
Everyone know that CA GEN it’s a great tools. But the tools know only among the GEN community not the business organization. The main difference between GEN and EGL is the license cost.
All,
EGL started life in a similar period of time as CA Gen. In those days it was known as CSP – Cross System Platform, it subsequently became VisualAge Generator. It’s syntax was used as the basis for the EGL Tool that IBM released with WebSphere Studio Enterprise Developer 9 or 10 years ago. In it’s most recent guise it is part of Rational Business Developer.
Right now it is no contest in terms of platform support and functionality – CA Gen wins hands down , but IBM Rational are changing the game by declaring an open source project for EGL.
From what I can see EGL has a much more technical syntax than CA Gen. It’s constructs are much closer to 3GL than 4GL. It kind of begs the question what’s the point? If you have such a highly detailed syntax why not simply write java or C#?
This differentiates the value proposition of CA Gen versus EGL. A higher level syntax and more detailed code generation versus a fairly detailed syntax that requires frankly higher quality programmers to get the best out of the technology…
CA Gen syntax is necessarily at a higher level of abstraction and therefore permits the huge variety of platforms that the it supports. EGL has a more specialised syntax and will inherently have narrow platform support as a result or have more patchy results.
Perhaps the debate here needs to be not CA GEn vs EGL, but rather what is the future of 4GLs and CASE?
Do we need a more visual, diagrammatic ‘syntax’ – which could just as easily be a UML diagram of some description? Does CA Gen need to evolve the other way? Increase integration with UML – help business analsysts get closer to code generation than ever before – like the good old IE days?
…my PERSONAL thoughts for what they’re worth
I agree Rola – I can’t seem to find a list of platforms that EGL supports – but I to agree that its not likely to be as many as CA Gen. In terms of experience with CA Gen’s latest release – I presume you mean the newly-released r8 version ?
If so – I know that the beta test was extremely well-received and few problems were found with the software before release – leading to a really stable code base with many new features. CA Gen is (as you say) able to “do” Web 2.0 and supports consumption of web services directly from a web interface (through its new Dreamweaver linkages) and is able to expose web services natively – either through an EJB, .Net or through Java proxies.
EGL is not enterprise ready from what I heard. It has security issues and doesn’t handle large transaction loads. It also doesn’t support nearly as many platform or languages as CA Gen.
I think CA Gen now has Web 2.0 and web services support. Its toolset is finally moving to be Eclipse based.
Does anybody have experience with CA Gen’s latest release?