Gentalk.biz - a blog about CA Gen

Journey’s end

Gentalk Gaffer — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 21:23:32 +0000

It has been a four-year roller-coaster trip, from the beginnings in May 2007, where I was astounded that I had even one visitor, to the movement from a free hosted solution to its own domain, through the heady days of the Gentalk interviews, and the Second-Life Gen Gatherings, the beta trials of CA Gen r8 through to its final release and even to its imminent service pack, the last four years have seen Gentalk.biz track what’s going on in the CA Gen world.

Today, however, I have reluctantly, for a number of reasons, and with a very heavy heart, decided to announce the closure of Gentalk.biz.

The one overriding thought that I will leave Gentalk.biz with (on a personal level) is the fact that I have made many new, good friends, both inside and outside of CA.

In the forseeable future (as long as it is possible to predict), I am not disappearing from the CA Gen community completely, and will continue to be involved in the CA Gen arena, both in my working life and as part of the ongoing development process of the toolset (as far as I am allowed). I will continue to promote what I will always see as a fantastic, innovative and productive development environment.

The site will be active (comments will be accepted) until around September 2011, when it will cease to be visible on the internet. Any requests for copies of the content should be made before then.

One final note to all readers, contributors, friends and associates who have made the 4-year Gentalk.biz journey possible, I can only say….

Thank you all

Its that time again!

Gentalk Gaffer — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 09:04:53 +0000

CA’s latest application development newsletter is out…..

Latest news includes a bunch of CA Gen roadshows in many States, you can register for them here

I’m not going to wax lyrical about the content, since you should be subscribing to this newletter ! Its well worth it to find out about “happenings” in the CA Gen world.

Subscribe here…

HE vs CSE for queries

Gentalk Gaffer — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 21:17:14 +0000

It’s surely been noticed by many of us Gen users that the Host Encyclopedia is much more difficult to query than the Client Server Encyclopedia?.

How, for example would you query the HE to find entity types that have not been implemented in the Technical Design?

I’ve looked at this and can’t for the life of me construct a query to do this – does anyone know how to get this information out of the HE ?

One of the things that would make our lives easier would be an easy query interface to the HE and CSE. I know that we have the public interface, but it’s still hard – can anyone help ?????

Web Services and the PSTEP Interface Designer

Gentalk Gaffer — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 09:51:23 +0000

Now that we have the ability to construct web services from CA Gen (on top of an EJB) one wonders if there is any experience of doing this in an existing CA Gen environment and any successes or failure, or points to note ?

Specifically:

Producing custom WSDL from the PSTEP I/D
Doing “contract-first” design
Performance tuning
Simple and Complex type definition
Security

These are the things that modern SOA systems are mindful of and need to do – discussion would be great, since this is a new-ish field of play for CA Gen, and many organisations will be considering this !

Happy New Year 2011

Gentalk Gaffer — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:01:47 +0000

Welcome to 2011 !

What do you

want CA Gen to do

for you in 2011 ?

I want CA Gen to continue to save me more development costs, let my developers be more productive, and finally, let me not worry about my platforms !

Just like it always has, but more of the same !

2010 was the year of r8 !

Gentalk Gaffer — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 16:31:10 +0000

I suppose the highlight of the year MUST be the release of CA Gen r8 (and its feature pack beta test).

The release of any new version of CA Gen is always met with a slew of new products and updates of existing products from the eco systems. CA Gen r8 was no exception.

Gen Studio, EJB web services, extra statements in Action Diagrams….

…and more and more and more….

you can search gentalk.biz for more r8-related posts here :

http://gentalk.biz/blog/?s=r8

2010 marked a major milestone in CA Gen’s evolution – lets hope 2011 holds more !

Merry Christmas to you all !

Gentalk Gaffer — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 16:44:44 +0000

Thanks for reading Gentalk.biz in 2010.

Have a great Christmas and a fantastic 2011!

We can look forward to Feature Pack 1, maybe Feature Pack 2 and a host of new products, updates and new functionality from the guys and gals at CA and the CA Gen ecosystem partners around the world….

2010 looking back

Gentalk Gaffer — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 15:28:25 +0000

I’m NOT going to do one of those “review of the year” posts this year, but I will be highlighting specific posts of particular interest to how CA Gen has moved forward in 2010.

First in the line to be highlighted is this one : “So now I’m home!” which was a look back at CA World 2010 and the tooling announcements by IET, APG and other partners. The fact that APG has invested in tooling to bring people TO CA Gen from other technologies is encouraging shows that there’s a market for that out there and it IS being successfully done.

More next time….

Christmas presents

Gentalk Gaffer — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 18:37:53 +0000

What would I like for Christmas ?

A brand new Jaguar (can’t afford that)

A second-hand Jaguar (can’t afford that either)….

….think….

I’ll settle for no call-outs over the Christmas period due to system failures. OK – It’s one of these Christmas presents that you know you are gonna have, but are happy when you get it !

Gen systems are among the most stable systems I have ever worked with and their stability never ceases to amaze me – which is why on Christmas morning my mobile phone will be off and no call-outs need to be taken!

Christmas – sooooooo predictable !

Evil under the sun – but many moons ago!

Gentalk Gaffer — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 10:42:20 +0000

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 !