CA Partners

Evil under the sun – but many moons ago!

Discovering a bug this week in a piece of CA Gen code that I’d written (many) years ago made me wish I had tools like “VerifIEr” or “Model Analyser” years ago.

The behaviour was that a local view I’d assumed was keeping its value wasn’t and I worked out why very early on, but it still cuased a latent problem.

Stupidly, I’d clicked “Initialise on every entry” on a local view which was wrapped up in a CA Gen batch program.

If I’d had VerifIEr or Model Analyser all those years ago, we could have found that out and fixed it through a proper automated code review.

What’s the evil ? Simply not having enough tools to review and find issues with your code at the time you write it OR not enough testing.

Put simply – tools like Model Analyser and VerifIEr save SOoooooooo much time !

EDGE APAC 2010 is now !

EDGE APAC 2010 is on NOW in Canberra, Australia – hopefully, someone who’s there will let me know how it went and grab some pictures !

Looks like a great Agenda !

Another effort-saving idea for CA Gen programmers!

In IET’s blog, they often come up with bright ideas for CA Gen developers.

The latest is no exception – here, they talk about an alternative mechanism for passing data through many levels of chained action blocks.

The method they describe works, but also has a number of additional bebefits to those they highlight:

• Improving developer efficiency – not only does it reduce the number of changed action blocks (leading to quicker migrations) but reduces the risks of “getting it wrong”.
• In environments where ALL changed action blocks undergo rigorous testing, reducing the number of changed action blocks will also reduce the level of testing required and hence improve efficiency of the testers.

The CA GEN “CAGE” – what’s in there ?

Wikipedia defines an Eco-System as “…a biological environment consisting of all the organisms living in a particular area…”.

It also defines “Eco-System Services” as “….fundamental life-support services upon which human civilization depends…”.

This is true of the CA Gen Ecosystem (“CAGE”)  since “the CAGE” is fundamental to how CA Gen survives – take a look at the companies in “the CAGE” environment and what they do. Its easy sometimes to overlook these organisations (many of them are linked from the gentalk.biz front page – they provide valuable services for users of CA Gen.

When considering a particular project, or requirement for a function, its sometimes easy to dismiss something as not being available, or hard to do – look inside the CAGE – someone, somewhere must have done it – CrossfIEr is a great example of this – as is ModelCVS.

There are companies out there who have crossed pretty much every bridge in the Gen world and are ready to help you out – look in that CAGE and find them.

IET extends CA Gen’s functionality AGAIN !

IET have done it again – they’ve released CrossfIEr – an extension to their product range that allows automation of the code generation for all supported CA Gen platforms from a Host Encyclopedia.

This is a giant leap forward for Host Encyclopedia users who have previously not been able to control the generation of (say) .NET code from the mainframe encyclopedia. CrossfIEr is another example of IET listening to its’ customers needs and filling the gaps – I don’t think that there is a single IET product that is a “product for a product’s sake” – ALL of their products, tools and utilities are extremely useful and fill the needs of the users exactly !

Get the lowdown on the product here with the announcement or here for more detailed description