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Announcement : gentalk.biz

Over the next few weeks, Gentalk will be migrating to gentalk.biz – a new domain name, and a new look.

At present, the gentalk.biz name works, and everyone should start to use the new name – there are a few comments that need to be migrated to the new site, but that should happen in a few days.

Watch this space and thanks for continuing to return here – I hope its entertaining and worthwhile.

As an aside, the RSS feed will change, too – it will be http://gentalk.biz/blog/?feed=rss2 , or using feedburner, it’ll be http://www.feedburner.com/Ca-genWordsAndThoughts

If any one should note any problems, or have any criticisms, or in fact, anything to say about the new site, please leave a comment!

I have had some feedback which I am working on, and will hope to iron out the buglets as soon as possible !!!

John Swainson podcast supports Gen !!!!

Fantastic news!

CA’s President and CEO John Swainson speaks about the value that CA Gen brings to global organizations, trends in the market, CA’s commitment to CA Gen and the strength of EDGE as a user community.

Play it here:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 3 minutes, 8 seconds

John Swainson, President and CEO of CA, has great influence over the direction and evolution of CA Gen. This 3-minute informational podcast includes a discussion focusing on why he supports CA Gen and EDGE. He also discusses how CA is actively working on CA Gen release 8. Listen to John share his thoughts on the future of CA Gen and how you can make a difference in this plan by attending EDGEucate 2007, October 28-31 .

Don’t miss the hands-on labs, the exciting product updates from CA, and the more than 20 technical sessions focusing on Service-Oriented Architecture, Web Enablement, Legacy Modernization and more. In addition to the education, EDGEucate 2007 has great networking opportunities in store.

Don’t forget…Early-bird rates for EDGEucate 2007 end this Friday. If you register by 8/31, you’ll save $200! EDIT: Expired Offer

Download the Advance Program today for complete event details and to access the faxable registration form.

Also, registration for EDGE EMEA 2007, being held September 30-October 2 at Ditton Manor, UK is live. To sign up for this International event, go to www.eventbookings.com/ec2096.

To learn more about EDGEucate 2007, e-mail or call EDGE at +1.312.245.1589.

I think that it’s important that this strong message gets through to all the organisations that use Gen worldwide, to reinforce that Gen has a rosy future, and will support all new technologies, platforms and infrastructures going forward.

EDIT:   Also check out the EDGE’s new podcast site ! Next podcast will be EDGE members talking about EDGEucate 2007 and EDGE EMEA 2007.

3rd-party Generators for Gen

Thinking about my previous post where I alluded to a potential for there being Ruby support in a future version of Gen, I stumbled upon a possible way forward for Gen to be an even bigger tool than it actually is …..

Since the new versions of Gen are going to be Eclipse-based i.e. based on a freely available framework – which sort of builds upon the current developer trend for adapting frameworks for use with plug-ins, what if there were a published “Gen Generator” API into which 3rd party generators could be produced?

 This would reduce the time to market for new languages and frameworks to be supported, whilst still giving CA the chance to market the tool and the superb encyclopedias for code repositories.

Look at the success tools like GuardIEN have had – no-one uses the native Gen tools anymore to migrate and control versions – nearly all the big sites use GuardIEN – but this has not reduced CA’s marketing collateral in terms of selling Gen licenses !

If publishing an API for the generators, or a plugin-style architecture could be considered, then many more languages and frameworks could be supported by development teams (either in the freeware, or open source or commercial spaces) as well as by CA themselves.

Potential candidates for generators could be Ruby, other .NET languages that appear, Python (possibly for smaller systems). Additionally, generators for different platforms (still C, COBOL etc etc) could be produced in this way.

Of course, there will still be support issues to consider, but potentially if a good generator for, say, C on a MacOS platform were to be developed, or possibly a Symbian OS target, then it could be adopted by CA as a de-facto and supported.

I suppose what I am saying is that by splitting the product up into the developer interface and a back-end generator, the people that build generators could be used as “incubators” to add to the target platforms later on when the generators are formally adopted …..

This could only strengthen the “write once, deploy many” argument that IS Gen !

Should Gen allow database-specific settings ?

Following on from the last post on database independance, it got me thinking…..

 Since there are DB2-specific settings available in Gen could we not have Oracle or Datacom settings (or any other database that Gen supports ?) 

What settings would we need ?

 Well…..

…as a for instance, very often IU have had to hack some code to allow an “explain plan” to be set for a specifi piece of SQL which we perceive to be non-performant – I’d like to rebuild a piece of batch or online code with the ability to switch on or off this feature for a specific READ statement when I build – the syntax may be different for each database, but the generation options I select lead to database-specific pieces of SQL being generated anyway depending on the target database – so why not this ?

 … as another for instance,  when I am setting up a new entity in Gen and need to retransform to get the DDL, I always have to have my DBA’s modify the DDL to add in their clauses for creating the corresponding table in a certain tablespace or a specific disc for optimum performance – similarly with indexes, we have to amend the DDL to allow for specific fragmentation strategies.

It would, I admit, lead to an issue when changing database technology, but then, the planning for disc layouts and index structures HAS to be redone anyway, so why not capture that information in a Gen model and have the whole system self-contained.
This could be seen as a counter-argument to Gen’s flexibility in that system-specific settings and physically-dependant settings are in the Gen model, but at least all of them are then in the same place. Any time a relayout of the database on the physical discs is carried out for reasons of performance or new hardware procurement, then the Gen model is changed and retransformed and the new DDL can be produced.
My point is that ALL aspects of the system can then be controlled from within the model.

It would be interesting to hear feedback on this, as it is a continuing discussion within my own organisation as to where this “database stuff” is best kept…….

Database Independance

Is it really true that Gen can deploy into different environments ?

Yes – it is, but what happens when you change the database technoloigy that is underlying the application ? Does Gen help here ?

 Again, it does, but you need to be careful for a number of reasons:

i) There may be different sort orders in the new database platform – particularly if you are moving from a mainframe to unix environment (EBCDIC to ASCII)

ii) Default field lengths may be different

iii) Character sets may be different (specifically if you are dealing with non-standard character sets)

iv) Performance tuning starts from scratch again, as different requirements need to be taken into consideration.

v) and many more besides 

Gen can help in a number of ways, but the primary way is that it leaves the DBA-types to concentrate on the tuning needs and results of tuning can be sent to the developers who can concentrate on getting a performant system, and NOT on actually cutting code.

It can help in as much as the focus on a project to change database need not be on the code or the platform-specific stuff needed to get a system up and running, the focus should be on the differences, not the basics.

It could also be argued that Gen hides the database technology from the developer. This is (in the main) a good thing, but thinking about one of my previous posts (Model-based Development and Top Fuel Dragsters)that the Gen developer should understand what goes on under the bonnet – he/she should understand what portions of the application are controlled by his/her code and what parts of the application will be affected by a change in database technology.

Is this abstraction a good or a bad thing ?

It depends on how you manage it.

Giving developers an appreciation of HOW the application and database interact IS valuable, and necessary, but IN-DEPTH knowledge isnt required. Development teams can be stronger with knowledge outside their domain.