SOA

Grand Re-Opening Podcasts available

The podcasts of all the sessions that took place at the Grand Re-Opening are now available for download, or you can play them from this page:

• Introduction and Keynote Speech

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• ModelCVS by APG

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• Advanced Gen Systems Model Analysis

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• Bringing Gen into an SOA

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In total, there is approximately 90Mb of podcast data available, that’s around 90 minutes of interesting, valuable and thought-provoking content.

Grand Re-Opening Resources available

Here are the pictures from last night’s Grand Gen Village Re-Opening.

Download them as a zip file here

More resources over the next few days will be posted - slides, videos and podcasts to come from the presenters – APG, Jumar and Everware-CBDI.

Speakers Finalised for the Gen Village Grand Opening

The speakers have been finalised at the Grand Opening of the Gen Village in Second Life on Tuesday 26th August :

• Jumar Solutions
• ARIKAN Productivity Group
• Everware-CBDI

The four speakers will be talking about Gen-related subjects applicable to all Gen users around the world.

The Event starts at 9pm UK time, and wherever you are in the world, come along at the start of the event, and stay through until the end, or drop in and see a specific presentation – the Agenda is at the http://gathering.gentalk.biz website.

Please be aware that the running order and times may vary slightly, but the speakers should not change between now and the event.

The Event starts at 9PM UK Time, so please check to see what that represents in your local time – and remember tha the UK is in BST (British Summer Time) at the moment.

It will be a fantastic event, with much to offer all Gen users in terms of information, networking and may be making some new friends and contacting like-minded Gen users across the globe. You can speak freely to the presenters during the intervals between the presentations, and/or contact them later on.

A video of the event will be uploaded to EDGE and gentalk.biz soon after, as will an audio podcast

The event is generously sponsored by EDGE and the ARIKAN Productivity Group, who will be represented.

Come along and make it a memorable event!!!!!

Refactoring choices

After attending the Gathering last wednesday, it seems that there are (anecdotally) more customers moving their front end processing to Java and .NET and leaving their back end processing on their mainframes, rather than moving the whole solution off the mainframe and downsizing to midrange systems.

Perhaps this reflects the move to systems which are NOT simply a total Java solution or a .NET solution – proving that one of the original paradigms actually work – that a Gen-based solution can be a mix of technologies.

This ability plays right into the hands of the SOA evangelists – in that the whole point of a SOA is that systems can be mixed without being reliant on the technologies - and exposing their functionality both internally and externally. 

CoolProfs – “Just SOA – Hype and Implementation”

I recently attended T-Systems’ Gen Day in Vienna. The first of the presentations was CoolProfs‘  WebServices Presentation. Rogier van Applien introdced web services, what they were and why people need an SOA. Putting it simply, interconnections between systems can get very messy and introducing an ESB fixes that BUT how does Gen interconnect with other service-based applications both in the consumption and exposition of web services ?

This presentation concentrated on the consumption of Web Services by the Web Services Connector by CoolProfs. Effectively the product constructs the EABs for you via a “wizard” approach, helping you do the view mapping and assisting with the generation. The demonstration used a live web service available freely on the internet and integrated it into a small Gen test harness (also generated by the product). The product takes the WSDL file of the web service, allows the developer to select the impirt and export views to match up and then auto creates the EAB (Java only at the moment, but we are told that other languages may appear in time) and a test harness.

The demonstration showed that with a little ingenuity its possible to consume web services easily and quickly.  The discussion that ensued afterward also showed that people need to consume web services from other languages such as COBOL and other platforms such as Unix and mainframe – lets hope that the facilities for that appear soon.