APG

IET add 1 to the 39 Steps

Last full day of CA World 2010 Sessions today. The morning kicked off with IET‘s “39 Steps to Improve Developer Productivty”. IN true IET style, they gave us 40 steps, not 39 ! They presented how their tools can save developer time and increase productivity.

After lunch Next came a lab by APG, demonstrating the power of their ProgGen software which can take COBOL programs, and create fully working CA Gen models out of them (yup – really !!! I’ve seen the technology before and it STILL amazes me!). It doesnt stop there, since it also works with PL/1, Adabas/Natural and other 3GL Languages.

This was followed up with a session on the CA Gen proxies and how they can be used to extend Gen’s reach and make its functionality available to other technologies – a major benefit of the CA Gen technology.

Last of the day was a session from Ryan Johnson of Response Systems – his take on the upgrade process in Gen – traditionally a process fraught with danger. Applying careful thought, it can be de-risked and made less painful (together with the latest release of CA Gen – which aims to make upgrades easier of course!).

There are some truly smart people out there in CA Gen -land !!!!!

2010 is the year of Model-Based-Development

…. so says this Tweet from Estefan Euler

…. but Gen has been doing it for years!

Seriously, though, Model-Based-Development may have “come home” this year with many conferences such as QCON London and  CodeGeneration 2010 happening and focussing on it, together with an increase in interest from Microsoft.

I hope that this will be an increase in focus on CA Gen and what it can provide to the enterprise.

ProgGen – Code Generation

I’ve long been a supporter of the work that APG is doing in the Gen space, specifically with promoting the use of Model Based Development. It’s good to see that they are exploiting the true strength of a Model-Based-Development environment – i.e.  models for other purposes than originally designed – thus extending the range of possiblities and therefore getting more return of investment from those models.

They will be promoting their technology at CodeGeneration 2010 in Cambridge, UK.

I’d urge anyone with either an academic or professional interest in Model Based Development as a whole to attend this conference and hear what they have to say.

To connect with like-minded people to discuss Model Based Software Development, a great place is the SOMOMOSOEN group. There are some very informative papers which can be downloaded there.

Legacy Modernisation

There is an appetite for Legacy Modernisation lately – its become apparent that organisations are increasingly looking toward reusing their assets in new ways and porting their existing technologies toward more productive tools, without having to throw away the last “n” years of effort and investment.

There are a number of tools and services out there that allow businesses to migrate away from so-called Legacy platforms on to “newer” or “hot” platforms like Java etc etc, but why would anyone do that from Gen ?

It seems to me that one would consider platforms to migrate TO that were more cost-effective that the current platform that the business were on, otherwise why would a modernisations be required in the first place (such as CA Gen) ?

Checkout APG’s ProgGen for examples of organisations that are using modernisation techniques.

SOMOMOSODE – what’s that ?

SOMOMOSODE, or “Software Modernization and Modelbased Software Development” is a new interest group that’s been set up on the Xing social networking platform. It’s being spearheaded by Mustafa Arikan of APG, who produce the excellent ProgGen software translation tool. Its a forum for people to discuss and network with a common interest – Model Based Software Development.