Gen History

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.

My feet were in the clouds at CA World 2010

At CA World 2010 – there was a mysterious pair of feet at the Cloud Commons area (www.cloudcommons.com)  at CA World 2010 …..

… the new CA-sponsored site for cloud computing.

This is interesting (not simply because of those feet) but since cloud-enablement is on the CA Gen futures list (more about that soon) it makes sense to get involved and learn about cloud services and cloud computing in general.

Oh and yes - they ARE my feet !!!!

So now I’m home !

Having been at CA World 2010 in Las Vegas for a week, it’s time to reflect on the “State of the Union” for a time.

So what did I discover (in summary) ?

• CA Gen has a healthy roadmap for the next couple of years
• The partners are coming up with ever more useful and productive add-ons for the toolset (QAT‘s QAT Exchange and the Agility BPM tools)
• Existing tools are being enhanced on an almost daily basis (IET‘s VerifIEr)
• Tools are being developed to bring people TO CA Gen (ProgGen by APG)
• The CA Gen market is healthy and prospering in parts of the world (as evidenced by CoolProfs‘ presentation)

But most of all, CUSTOMERS are using the tooling in innovative ways, as displayed by the numerous customer presentations that I attended at CA World. The fact that customers are ready to wax lyrical about their experiences with CA Gen speaks volumes about the passion they have for the product, but most of all that it continues to perform and is viable in today’s marketplace with so many other tools all trying to be the top of the tree.

James Cameron and CA World’s first full day

James Cameron, director and innovator and producer of such films as Titanic and Avatar finished off the first full day of the CA World 2010 Conference.

The CA Gen sessions today were many and varied – the roadmap for CA Gen looks fit and healthy as delivered by CA staff, with evidence that the toolset is evolving and moving forward into areas that it needs to – Cloud is on the roadmap, so is SaaS !

Delving down into the specifics, a presentation by CA on SOA and CA Gen with respect to the new functionality available in CA Gen r8 (just gone GA !) and how it differs (positively) from previous releases – Web Services on top of EJBs, Dreamweaver interaction and more.

Next, a demonstration by CANAM Software Labs of the XML Composer tooling which allows CA Gen to consume web services exposed by remote systems. This is a great tool since it shields the developers from any “guts” of External Action Blocks in C or COBOL or whatever – so comsuming XML from files, web services etc is now easy!

Then came the infamous EDGE reception in the LAX Nightclub in the Luxor Hotel – trust me – you HAD to be there !

Looking forward to tommorow – a completely packed day full of Gen stuff – what more could I want !