gen features

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 !

Data model consistency

One of the strengths of CA Gen is the fact that it can manage your data model fron end to end. There are however dangers in NOT doing this.

Consider a situation where a site adds a new entity to the data model – the database team then add that table and a few indexes to the the database (independently – without using retransformation).

The development team then code the application around the new entity, test it in various environments and it goes into production.

However, the database team have to modify the DDL for each environment (because they need to tweak storage parameters, for example), and they accidentally misspell a column name when they apply the change to the production database.

The application is going to fall over.

OK – perhaps this says more about a site’s configuration management than CA Gen, but it does point to the fact that if you let CA Gen produce your DDL and apply it to a database, you will have more confidence in the consistency of the Logical Data Model and the Physical Data Model (i.e. your entities and your tables)

Let CA Gen do its’ work for you !

Now – if only we could import ERWin schemas into CA Gen…..

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.

East Wind blows for CA Gen

Today is the 6th Japanese CA Gen user group day in Tokyo. The agenda is packed, containing sessions about CA Gen and the cloud,and how CA Gen interoperates with Application Performance Management.

It promises to be yet another great event.

On another note, there’s a good comparison of CA Gen with other development tools here (you’ll need to use Google’s translate service to read it if you aren’t fluent in Japanese). Unsurprisingly, CA Gen comes out on top in a number of categories – but not start-up costs, however.

Now if we could fix that ……..  :-)

New CA Gen product certifications

CA Gen 8.0 has been certified on Cobol 4.2, Dreamweaver 5 and CICS TS 4.1 and VMWare Player 3.0.1 build-227600.
This marks a step change in the Gen product certification stakes since VMWare certififucation takes us closer to virtualised CA Gen deployments.
To get the latest information about which products are certified, sign up to the CA Tech Insider Application Development newsletter.