• Building the Business Case for CA Gen
• SOA Support inside of r8
• Migration
• Compliance

• CA Gen Web View : Dive into the details of the features offered by Web View including its heavy usage of technologies such as Ajax .
• Building the Business Case for CA Gen: Get a summary of the value propositions for leveraging CA Gen as a development environment.
• CA Gen in the Clouds : Take a look at how CA Gen can be leveraged to support Cloud Computing.
• SOA Support inside of r8 : Learn about three new offerings from CA Gen r8 that help you create and consume Web Services.
• Responding To Hard Times – Leveraging CBD/SOA Using CA Gen : Learn how to apply Legacy Modernization techniques of Component Based Development (CBD) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to maximize reuse of current CA Gen application assets.
• CA Gen 7.6 – How To Make It A Smooth Upgrade: Hear a customer success story based on their experiences of upgrading to CA Gen 7.6 and deploying 6,000+ components to production.

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Here’s a Google Translation link to get it into English – it’s got lots of information about the background of AKRA FT, and the technologies to watch for going forward.

One to watch !

There’s some really useful information here – go check it out !

CA World 2010 is announced and will be from May 16th to May 20th 2010. It’ll be back at Las Vegas in the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino. Check out the official CA World 2010 Website to find out more.

This calendar will contain events happening in the Gen community around the world. The next 5 events are displayed on the sidebar in the Gentalk.biz website. The idea is that you can add events to the calendar which will then be viewed by everyone in the community. If you’d like to have the facility to add your events to the calendar, drop me an email on info@gentalk.biz.

Anyone is encouraged to add events to the calendar – from product demos, webcasts, user group meetings and so on.

This is a great result!

Whilst its true that Gen is great for back end development (batch and server components) it’s (allegedly) not good at GUI development.

I disagree, and therefore agree with IET’s viewpoint – Gen can “do” servicable front and back end development – especially with products like IETeGUI out there.

But isn’t it about choice ? I SHOULD (and CAN) do all my GUI developement within Gen and the eco-system partners’ products, but it I want to “do” the UI in another product then I should be able to. It IS all about choice, but not the simple choice of “ease of use” – it comes down to many other factors – such as the level of code reuse between the UI and back end components; what the application is for – is it purely a service application with limited GUI; or does it need a rich AJAX-based interface ?

Factors like these will guide you to whether you need pure Gen; Gen + a product like IETeGUI (or OCX controls); or a third-party tool.

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Hopefully, this user group will grow from strength to strength !

You can download a Windows Media file (.WMV) here:

Jumar’s Dan Hobbs’ presentation was a light-hearted look at one of the more serious aspects of model-based-development – what happens when your model gets corrupted? He explained what model corruptions are, in the context of a simple example, and then proceeded to illustrate the concepts, and the answers to the problems with some concrete examples. Much of the corruptions that happen are benign, and Jumar has experience of what these are, however, some can cause untold damage, but Jumar has tools to identify and fix these issues.

John Gymer from IET spoke of many approaches to parallel development, model management and the best approaches to take depending on your requirements. His presentation provided food for thought in that many of the existing Gen sites have a model management structure which hasn’t been re-evaluated for a long time, since “it just works”. John’s words will prompt many people to consider just how many models they need and what environments they are to support, and vice versa.

John also launched IET 7.8 – the new updates to their tooling.

Virtualisation is a relatively new technology to the marketplace – Response Systems have seized the initiative and assessed what use it can be within the Gen environment. They have used it to evaluate new versions of Gen by creating images of PC’s with the Gen toolset installed and deployed them on target PC’s. Since images do not interact with the host PC, and therefore do not damage or change it, it can be destroyed after use.

They have also experienced the downside of virtualisation – the fact that memory is now the critical factor, as well as network bandwidth. They have realised that careful planning can enable virtualisation to assist greatly in their work.

Orjan from CSN’s presentation was an enlightened look at how they went about understanding CA’s commitment to Gen. They visited the labs and spoke to the developers, understood the impact Mainframe 2.0 has had on the r8 release of Gen, and come to the conclusion that CA’s vision for Gen is slowly evolving toward one which they are comfortable with, and therefore, have decided to invest in Gen for the medium-to-long term.

CA’s Dalia Soliman provided a LIVE audio and video demonstration from CA’s labs in Plano of how easy it will be in r8, to take a web service generated by Gen, now with no requirement for proxies! and consume it within a Dreamweaver HTML page.

The demo went well, showing how a service defined by a piece of XML can be generated from Gen and called from a page designed outside the toolset. At the moment, the interaction (at the design time) is handled by a Dreamweaver plugin, and (presumably) more will be available later for other web application design tools.

Lastly, Paul Hughes from Jumar focused on the planning, planning, planning and more planning that you need to undertake in any transformation and modernisation project! To enable you to understand how to get where you want to be – be it CBD, 3270 to GUI, or GUI to WUI, there needs to be a lot of planning, starting with understanding where you are now. Paul likened it to a SATNAV-type journey, where the first thing the SATNAV system does before giving you directions to where you want to go, is work out where it is! – after all, to get directions to a place, you need to know where you’re starting from…

For a downloadable PDF, with extra photographs, click here - just wait for the video !

ALSO happening on Wednesday 18th June is the COOLProfs Customer Day in Rotterdam, Holland – there will be speakers on migration to Gen 7.6 though to agile development.

BOTH days are worth attending if you are in the relevant countries !

Register for the UK event by sending and email to info@gentalk.biz, and the Dutch event by clicking here.

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This would be an interesting concept to get to grips with – maybe someone has already tried it ?

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• I’m in the garden (wireless laptop)
• I’m reading the latest edition of Visual Systems Journal

• ..and thinking – “Is Gen visual ?”

VSJ is a journal about programming and it centres around enterprise-scale systems delivered in so-called “visual languages” ranging from Sliverlight through to VisualPython and MS-Office programming.

It strikes me that Gen satisifies the criteria to be included in the discussions in the magazine – it is visual in that modelling takes place in a visual manner (diagramming tools etc), can be used to build enterprise-class systems, and is able to generate reusable components in technologies that can be used in SOAs etc

So – should Gen be included in the discussions in the magazine? I think so – maybe I’ll contact them and write an article for them – what do you think ?

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For example : get involved with EDGE EMEA 2009 here, CoolProfs customer day here,  and the UK & Ireland User Group here.

 I’ve been at a few of these and found great knowledge is transferred between users to the benefit of all !

See you at some of them !!!

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The seminar will be free to all attendees. The agenda (which is still being finalised) will be varied and interesting, and includes presentations from a number of CA-Gen users, all of whom have differing experiences of the product, both vendors and users.

The day will also provide opportunities for CA-Gen users to meet and make contact with other CA-Gen users in the UK, and form useful relationships, which will help both them and the product grow and develop into the future.

If you would like to present a session at the CA-Gen PLC Day– after all, it’s a USER Group – please volunteer using the info@gentalk.biz email address for a discussion.

If you wish to attend, please send an email to info@gentalk.biz.

Please let other UK-based  CA-Gen users know in order that we can grow the community!

Also, there is a PDF version of this note available here for download and printing if you so wish.

Which bits of it would I offer as a service ?

• The deployable artifacts, such as executables (so we would have a new paradigm here) – not new generators, but a new packaging option, maybe).
• The encyclopedia – so the code repository could be shared amongst several organisations, each having their own “View” of it.
• The toolset itself, so that nothing is ever installed on the local workstations at the organisations’ base?

All interesting possibilities !

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The first comparison is obviously how Gen has evolved since the first moves into Eclipse in Gen 7.6 (see here). With the announcements that Gen would be moving to Eclipse for its design tools, it clearly started a trend which will continue with r8.

Second for this post is the rise of other sites related to CA Gen on the internet – both QAT and IET have started blogs and have regular articles on CA Gen and other related subjects (both feeds are carried through Gentalk).

A lot has happened in the last two years – thanks for the support and readership – wonder what 2011 will be like !?

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Code restructuring can be done in an automated fashion only if the meaning of the code is understood, rather than a line-for-line code transformation process.

ProgGen is such a tool – it can understand the semantic meaning of the code that it parses and allow the meaning of the code to decide what restructuring can be done. The power of the code restructuring toolset is that it takes the 3GL type code – PL/1, Natural, COBOL etc and creates a metamodel out of it, which can then be used to change the paradigms and indeed the language that the transformation is directed at.

This paper can be downloaded from here.

It is really worth a look, and demonstrates the power that APG can bring to bear on your Legacy systems to modernise them and restructure them into the bargain.

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Yes, I know we have action blocks which we can call, but sometimes you just need a small few lines of code that could do a small job, that we could simply “add” with a click of a button.

Not sure how this would work in practical terms, with different view types and so on, but I’ll give it some thought – any ideas from the readership would be appreciated !!!

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CA Gen will be one of twenty six separate webcasts in May related to CA’s new mainframe strategy called Mainframe 2.0. Learn how CA Gen is a key technology in the implementation of Mainframe 2.0 as well as how Mainframe 2.0 will benefit CA Gen customers.  Get a firsthand look at the features in CA Gen r8, CA Gen’s evolution to Eclipse and how CA Gen continues to assist customers in making transitions to web-based architectures and SOA. CA Gen is part of CA’s Mainframe 2.0 initiative, showing a commitment to CA Gen as part of their flagship strategy to make mainframes easier to manage. 

I’ll be tuning in to see and hear it and take part – and get a glimpse of CA Gen r8!

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• EDGE EMEA 2009 will take place October 10-13, 2009, at Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam, Netherlands
• EDGEucate 2009 will take place October 28-30, 2009, at the Collin County College in Plano, Texas, USA

• 50% off of your registration fees to EDGE EMEA 2009 or EDGEucate 2009 or (A Value of €450/$250)
• Recognition as a featured presenter in 2009 marketing campaign and Web sites
• Exciting networking opportunities for you and your company

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Tuning the application and performance testing is a must, especially if changing the middleware (moving from, say, Client Manager to Direct TCP connections, or more radically from Tuxedo to Transaction Enabler).

Notable things to consider and be mindful of are memory requirements for the load modules, and the calculation of how much should be allocated to the application and how much to the OS, for example. Possible changes in the way the database engines work (assume you are changing database too!) will change the performance profile of the application – online and batch applications often have different performance curves.

The issues can be resolved – by performance testing and tuning early on, and before even that – considering the performance of the existing application on the existing platform and working out the differences in architecture on the new platform to see at least WHERE the effects will be felt if not what they are.

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Admittedly I haven’t looked into this a great deal as of yet, but the nearest match to currently supported Gen platforms is Microsoft’s Azure platform, based around .NET.
From a technology perspective, cloud computing appears to offer massively scalable infrastructure to organisations wishing to take advantage of  being  isolated from the underlying infrastructure that applications run on and allow them to focus on the development of the software which fits their needs.

Cloud computing is a serious contender for the future of computing as a commodity item, and it will be interesting to see if/when Gen and the Cloud come together.

Try and follow the Gentalk postings on Twitter by searching for Gentalk from your twitter account.

At the moment, I’m investigating the Encyclopedia API – so I’m twittering my experiences over the next couple of days/weeks with it. At the end of my investigations I’ll probably collate the experiences together into a post…..

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Lets see more Gen users and companies hosting CA Gen blogs !

The Gen-o-sphere is expanding !

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We’re proud that Gentalk.biz is making a statement about the fight against climate change, and we as individuals can sign up to participate, too. You can learn more about Earth Hour at www.EarthHour.org, and you can sign up to participate at www.EarthHour.org/signup.

If you’d like a high level history of Earth Hour, more than 50 million people in 400 cities around the world took part in Earth Hour 2008. The lights went out at Sydney’s Opera House, Rome’s Coliseum, the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge. Even the Google homepage went dark for the day. Many major corporations took part including HP, Coca-Cola, and Morgan Stanley.

If you think about it, CA Gen already supports the planet – how ? – by allowing more work to be done by less developers, since the tool is more productive than many other development environments, thereby reducing the carbon footprint and impact to the only planet we have..

This year, Earth Hour promises to be even bigger, with more signing on daily. People in nternational cities such as Beijing, Cape Town, Copenhagen, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, London, Manila, Mexico City, Moscow, Rome, and Toronto will be switching their lights out. You can view WWF’s video about Earth Hour 2009 at www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjWD8pbK5t8 to get a sense of the magnitude of this event.

Gentalk.biz is proud to support Earth Hour – I hope you’ll join us in uniting with the world to make a difference for our planet. Don’t forget—March 28^th at 8:30 pm, turn out, take action.

It strikes me that there are only two options when it comes to your IT projects:

1. Do them
2. Not do them

Option 2 is sometimes not an option, so its down to option 1!

When “doing” new IT projects it would make sense to senior managers and directors that those projects are done as efficiently as possible – enter CA Gen!

It’s a well known fact that CA Gen is more productive than many other development environments, so bizzarely, the credit crunch may be a good thing for CA Gen !

Not sure about the rest of the world though …..

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A wiki is a collaborative editing environment where people can add knowledge to a community. Obviously, people can retrieve that knowledge too ! Its a great opportunity to contribute your individual knowledge to the global knowledgebase about CA Gen on the Internet. EDGE is truly the “window on the world” of Gen development.

Any amount of input is valuable – but you have to be an EDGE member to contribute – another great reason for joining EDGE !

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It is well worth a read – you can download it here

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Support this initiative and sign up to the webcast – a great example of CA committing to CA Gen as a strategic product:

“Mainframe 2.0 and Electronic Software Delivery “

10th March 2009 at  2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EST

At CA World 2008 Mainframe 2.0 was launched, an ambitious effort to redefine how software is installed and managed on z/OS. One of the first Mainframe 2.0 deliverables is a new Electronic Software Delivery (ESD) process that allows CA products and service to be downloaded from the internet and installed directly from DASD without the need to use intermediate tape volumes.  This is available now for most of the z/OS products.

Please join CA’s David Luft and David Danner as they give an overview of Mainframe 2.0 and explain the new ESD process. The presentation will be approximately 45 minutes with a Q&A at the end. It will show you how to simplify and improve your installing and maintaining of CA software on z/OS. The presentation will be technical in nature and will be of interest to systems programmers, managers, and others interested in learning about the new ESD process.

Register HERE

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I’ve been following this series with interest, as I’ve always found the crafting of plugins a little bit of a “black art”  – putting it simply, it just seems too hard for words  – maybe I’m not looking in the right places as a starting point!

Does anyone have any pointers to creating plugins using the “traditional” OLE Automation route or the C API route ?

The discussion centres around whether the only way to get maximum benefit from Model Based Development (like Gen) is to regenerate completely from the model. From reading the threads, it seems that many people have tools and/or processes which allow 90+% generation from model, and that they have to allow for a certain amount of hand-coding and tweaking the generated code.

Of course, in a Gen environment (EABs aside) we get 100% code generation ready for deployment.  The tooling is geared up for this, so I can’t understand why anyone would want to have tools that don’t support 100% code generation. Many parts of the discussion seem to hint that some code generated by the tools that the participants use is wrong and NEEDS manual overriding – something which is alien in the Gen world.

Check out the discussion and see what you think !

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For the life of me, I can’t see any rationale behind this notion. Why take a system that is proven to work and has forward-compatibility with ANY technology that arises in the future and lock it in to Java ?

Once the system is written in Java, it would be an onerous task to convert to another technology or paradigm, one which would cost a lot and introduce risk into the system lifecycle.

I’m not aware of any other tooling that has the capability of Gen when it comes to targetting technologies as diverse as Mainframe, Client/Server and the web – so why would anyone do this?

Answers on a postcard please ???

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This webcast will now take place on 18th Feb 2009 at 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. EST for approximately 1 hour .

The date has changed due to circumstances beyond CA’s control.

To read the original abstract, see here

Register now for the webcast to gain benefit from CA’s experience.

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Of course, I didn’t think about the other obvious candidate  – a .NET API

It seems that someone in QAT has had sort of the same ideas, since in their new blog  – specifically this post, they talk about generating (presumably for internal use) a .NET wrapper for the C API.

The article is the first of a series (hence the “….Part 1″ in the title) which I’ll be watching out for.

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“Learn how Jumar’s Project Phoenix tools can help you upgrade and modernise your CA Gen applications with a high degree of automation – starting with the critical first step of any modernisation project, model and portfolio analysis. This upfront automated analysis provides a context for the project, delivers metrics for planning and estimation and highlights key issues and areas of complexity.
This web seminar will introduce the Model Analyser tool for CA Gen model and portfolio analysis and demonstrates its value in preparing for all your CA Gen projects such as  modernisation, upgrades and new enhancements.”

Agenda:

• Model and Portfolio Analysis – Why?
• Understanding the Starting Point
• Using Model Analyser for Planning and Estimation
• Model Analyser Extensions for Different Project Types and Modernisation Styles
• Architecture Analyser
• Examples, Practicalities

Register now for THIS webcast, or, register for the whole webcast series here:

It accurately reflects the iterative process behind the “growing” of ecosystem products – customers suggest stuff which fulfils a genuine need and it gets implemented in the product – power to the people !!!

• the PPT slides
• the PDF slides
• the FLV video
• audio podcast or play it here:

Play the video here:

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Malcolm presented an overview of the productivity tool that can check your CA-Gen code and verify that it follows standards and, more importantly, perhaps, look for potential issues in your code.

He explained that after the product has QA Checked your Gen code, one of the aims of the product is to make the “thing” that has failed the QA check as clear as possible – even to the extent that the tool could automatically correct it for you – he gave an example of view reordering.

Thats a great productivity gain for developers and ultimately increases CA Gen’s position as a seriously productive toolset.

There are a plethora of reporting options contained within the tool and all of them are configurable in many ways, enough for developers to actually pinpoint the source of the problem rather than a generalist statement.

There are many QA checks which come as built-in with the tool but they can also be site-specific and built yourself with the QA Console SDK.

The second part of the presentation showed us how to create a custom check for use with QA Console, and how its important to understand the underlying encyclopedia structure in order to do this effectively – Malcolm showed us that Response Systems’ knowledge of the encyclopedia is extensive.

I’d like to thank Malcolm for his time, and know that the attendees will want to thank him too.

I learnt a lot – not just about the tools being demoed, but the CSE and HE encyclopedia too – there’s knowledge in this presentation that’s valuable!

Remember that the video, audio and a copy of the slides will be posted here and on the EDGE an Response Systems’ sites in a few days time…. keep watching!

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to the Gen Village

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The Network Dinners are a great way to meet other Gen practitioners on an intimate basis and discuss the issues of the day, alongside a presentation.

After a tour of the stadium (which is enormous!), where we got the chance to see behind the scenes, in the England changing rooms, go through the tunnel on to the pitch and hear about the history of both the old and the new stadiums (see the pictures below) , we returned to the comforts of the corporate box, some fantastic food and a presentation from Rob Jasper of Schuitema NL, a retailler in Holland on revitalising their 3270 Gen application and the benefits they received from it.

Schuitema used Jumar’s Project Phoenix tools and methods to take their existing 3270 application (store and stock management) and componentise it and layer it such that future changes could be made easier and quicker. They also changed the paradigm from 3270 to the web which allowed them to use other channels such as PDA’s to access the Gen back-end server components.

Using tools like Project Phoenix and CA-Gen allows organisations to levarage existing codebases (which are, after all, an asset) and keep deriving value from them many years after other tools’ value has diminished.

Thanks to Jumar for the hospitality, Rob for the insight into what he does and the other Genners at the event for stimulating, interesting conversation.

For further details on how the QA Console can be used to develop your own complete QA Solution leveraging your current in-house Gen skills without reliance on third parties, visit http://www.response-systems.com/solutions/qa/ or email info@response-systems.com.

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“Well, I’ve seen it so what do I think?

Having had a background in programming without the aid of some bells-n-whistle IDE or rainbow coloured syntax GUI editor, When Gen was first described to me by someone obviously very passionate about it I decided to appear interested but deep down remained a little sceptical, after all they say love is blind?

In fact I very quickly realised how ‘useful’ this environment is (I’m referring to ‘useful’ as NOT being the ability to change background colours into one of a thousand different shades, or use some fancy font first discovered by a 5 year olds first experience with a crayon). NO, I mean really useful… it provides the ability to ’see’ very quickly how the application being analysed/designed/developed/supported is connected. My first delve into the model and the ability to see the direction the code took calling or being called when trying to understand program flow, brought an instant smile to my face. At times, when trying to find one’s way around coded modules, it can be like looking for a needle in the wrong haystack… but this was something different.

I’ve yet to use Gen in earnest, but a quick go at producing some code from the model soon had me trying to hide shouts of ‘wow’, instead choosing to mutter it under my breath, after all I didn’t want to sound too keen.

So in conclusion??? Well I wouldn’t say it was the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen, but I quickly reminded myself of the phrase ‘all frills and no knickers’!! My scepticism has taken a dent since seeing the Gen Toolset in operation, as this is something that has real and tangible benefits for the entire life-cycle. It’s clever, clean, efficient and smart enough to know that humans aren’t perfect, even if we like to think we are.”

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Of course I will put a write up about it and maybe some pictures too !

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I cant be sure that this was malicious or not, but I disabled downloads for 2 days. Now, downloads are back.

Once again – I apologise for any issues that this incident has caused….

Happy downloading.

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I apologise for this action, but hopefully, normal service will be maintained soon.

PLEASE support me in this endeavour by returning in a few days time when I will announce that the download facility will have been restored – hopefully!

Thanks.

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I’ve seen some of the tooling that Jumar uses and in the right hands it can be powerful and exciting technology. But in the wrong hands, like any other tool, it can be potentially dangerous. Modernising Gen systems is easy, yet hard ! It’s easy because Gen is designed to be forwardly compatible with newer technologies and platforms, yet to leverage some paradigm changes, such as 3270 to Web, you need some assistance with the refactoring of the codebase – let Gen worry about generating code for the new platform – that’s straightforward – but refactoring code and converting older code to be web-friendly, or client/server friendly needs some help.

It’s great that there are tools in the ecosystem to migrate older languages (such as PL/1) and tools and services to evolve those applications forward toward the future.

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It’s a free program since its included in the annual maintenance fee – it allows upgrades to be planned in conjunction with CA to leverage their knowledge and experience in upgrading other systems.

Whilst not going as far as saying that upgrading is “risky”, it has to be acknowleged that an upgrade is probably one of the most fraught times for a system in its lifecycle after the initial go-live.

It’s usually almost impossible to do an upgrade without outside assistance – CA is a great place to start for a safety net!

One of the key points in the webcast for me is obvious, but not always stated – the farther the jump between releases, the more work will be required, since you will need to make all the small changes that have been made between each of the “nearer” releases.

If you are planning an upgade, I recommend that you listen to this webcast – 20 minutes well spent – but the final message was that 7.6 forms the basis for future releases, and will make upgrading easier in the future.

As advertisers must say these days -”other upgrade assistance tools/services are available”……

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That’s great news for mainframe customers, but more so for CA Gen – because the tools that underpin the Mainframe 2.0 initiative are written in CA Gen !! – That means that pretty much all the mainframe owners who use CA tools will be running CA Gen applications on their mainframe!

Why else is this great news for CA Gen – because it shows CA’s commitment to the tooling is so strong that they are basing their entire mainframe strategy going forward on software written with it !

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OK – here goes ….

• Keep evengelising about CA-Gen
• Keep promoting the best software development tool on the planet
• Ensure that the world comes to know how great a history and how rich a future CA-Gen has
• Connect the users of Gen in as many ways as possible

Lets see if I can keep them!

Have a great 2009

I wonder what 2009 will bring to the Gen community ?!!!

For one, I’d like better explanatory text in the error messages (within the online help) – sometimes, you stumble across a runtime error that you’d not had before, and need more immediate help – the online help needs a little revamping to be more explanatory – that would be a simple, easy, “do-able” Christmas present !

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“In January 2009 Jumar kicks off a series of important webcasts which demonstrate a variety of techniques and best practices for upgrading and modernising your existing CA Gen applications.   You will discover new and automated methods which can dramatically increase productivity and reduce the overall time and cost of transition.

This comprehensive series is intended to be viewed in sequence for maximum benefit and will cover an innovative new approach that supports all flavours of modernisation from componentisation, SOA, re-architecting and re-layering to creating new web applications from block mode and GUI applications, re-platforming and downsizing.

Entitled ‘Modernisation Strategies: For 21^st Century CA Gen Applications’ – the first Webcast will highlight the various types of modernisation options and explain the specific challenges posed by each as well as how you can automate many steps of your CA Gen upgrade and modernisation projects.  The alternative objectives and motivations for modernisation will be discussed along with traditional approaches to modernisation and the possible reasons for their failure.

The free Webcasts will be approximately 45 minutes long plus questions.  For more information on these Webcasts or to register your interest please visit http://www.jumar-solutions.com/jumar-solutions/register-webcast.php or if you have specific requirements you would like to discuss please contact Paul Hughes on +44 (0) 121 788 4550“

Registering will ensure that you don’t miss any of these webcasts – the first is likely to be on the 21st January 2009…….

The focus this time will be on the in-world training system which can be used by all users of the Gen community to deliver short, subject-specific training courses.

The training system is easy to use, administer and control, and allows targetted training within the Gen community.

It struck me that there was no mechanism for the Gen community to have short, one-hour training courses on VERY detailed technical subjects that would be lost in amongst other, larger, longer training courses, so I developed the in-world training suite.

The training suite can be used to deliver free or paid-for training – so why not come along next Wednesday and see for yourself !

Registering for this event either below or in-world will also enrol you as a student in the Gen Academy and you will be automatically signed up to the demonstration course which will mean you will receive personalised training materials in your in-box.

Then, both sides go away and design and build their respective components in parallel before coming together again later to test the interfaces and so on.

It strikes me that Gen doesn’t adhere to this way of thinking as yet, but how cool would it be if designers could choose to construct some WSDL “in the middle” and feed it to a developer on either side of the consumer/servicer fence (either or both could be Gen developers), and tooling could construct skeleton code into which developers plug the functionality.

Having this tooling in place would maximise the productivity of a Gen developer, since they could import a piece of WSDL ready to have the “gaps” filled in – a bit like crafting an EAB “user written code inserted here” but based around sensible standards.

What do you think ?

It follows, then that in a heterogeneous environment consisting of Gen components and non-Gen components, there are parts of the Gen lifecycle that need to be automated – this includes code generation and building.

For the most part, Gen can work in this arena, as most of the generators (encyclopedia-based, anyway) have CLI (command line interfaces).  This works fine for online, batch, and client/server packaged components. Other types of packaging are not so controllable.

Once the code is generated, the compilation is usually straightforward enough to automate.

For Gen to be truly “Automatic for the People” (apologies to Mr. Stipe!) ALL types of packaging need to be controlled by the command line as well as though the toolset.

What this means in practice is that probably 99% of the Gen components will be deployable to the new platform with little if no issue, but as soon as EABs are introduced, the risk that there will be significant effort involved in replatforming those components. This goes for custom middleware implementations, and modified build scripts.

All of these aspects serve to increase the effort required to replatform a Gen application and also reduce the value that might have been gained by using Gen in the first place.

It has to be said, that there are things that Gen simply can’t do, so implementing those in EABs is obviously the only way to go, but be sensible in how this is done – don’t use operating system specific calls if at all possible, for example.

“Staying between the lines” and using as much pure Gen as possible is rather like using motorways/autobahn/freeways etc to get to your destination – well marked, easy to see and understand.

Try using “B-roads” or farm tracks (akin to using custom code and bespoke code in EABs) and the map is less clear and you will probably take longer and get more and more frustrated…..

Duration 60 min.

Learn how to deploy and invoke a .NET proxy as a web service within IIS. The process is simple and can be used to easily access CA Gen servers with a web service interface. Using a .NET proxy does not limit support to just .NET Servers, the proxy is capable of accessing most CA Gen generated server platforms. This should interest any development groups looking for a quick and simple way to turn their existing servers into web services.

Register now

EDGE EMEA 2009 Conference this year is in Amsterdam.

I attended EDGE EMEA 2007 and found it to be a great place to interact and share views, knowledge and experiences with other Gen people – vendors, other customers and CA themselves.

It is one of the highlights of the European CA-Gen calendar – make every effort to addend this conference – if you’ve been before, you know how valuable it is – if you haven’t come along and find out.

My first EDGE conference was EDGE EMEA 2007 in Ditton Park, London – my second will be EDGE EMEA 2009 in Amsterdam – it will CERTAINLY not be my last !

EDIT:Here’s a MS-Outlook Appointment for you to download and put in your Diaries !!!!

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The videos that were posted here a few days ago are now available on the downloads section of the EDGE website  – www.edgeusergroup.org.

It really is worth having a look around at the downloadable resources on the site, there are many presentations from previous EDGE conferences, useful code snippets, whitepapers and tools and utilities for the Gen Developer.
 
The EDGE website is really the “Window on the World” for Gen developers, and one of the first places you should go to get answers, resources and information about Gen. EDGE will give you direction and assistance in every aspect of Gen – sign up and get the benefits.

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Webcam Video of 1st Life Reception

Webcam Video of 2nd Life Reception

The First-Life video is very tongue-in-cheek – it perhaps illustrates the fun that was had at the event !

The Second-Life video follows the same format although with an altogether more staid music selection !

See them to believe them.

In my opinion, the EDGE Multiverse Reception (I believe a first for CA World) was a success – even though I wasn’t at the Venetian, I felt part of the event  – let’s hope there are more of these !!!!

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In addition, there is the box-out on page 14 reviewing the “Long Haul” – that is – an investment in Gen over many years reaps benefits!

I would certainly agree that one way of getting the benefits of Gen IS to invest for the longer term, but on the flip side, one of the initial benefits of the tooling is that Enterprise-class systems can be built quickly and with a low developer count – so – YES – you will get benefits over time, but those benefits start being realised almost immediately your organisation is up and running.

Last day tomorrow !!!!!

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I totally agree with this notion- a Corolla is the example that they give – first with us in the 1960s it is reliable and safe to purchase.
So – lets go to the tuning shop and get those spoilers on….
….which is just what has happened in Holland for Schuitema – as detailed on page 14 of the same issue – a long-established reliable in-store application rearchitected (by Jumar) for the web……

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We had the chance to catch up with some friends and colleagues without ever leaving the UK !!!!!

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Jumar’s Model Analyzer gets a mention on page 4, and page 5 gives us a look forward to a session looking at CA-Gen in the banking industry in Europe, whilst page 15 reminds us to look forward to the EDGE Reception tonight !!! 

Remember, you can participate in Second Life by Teleporting to the Gen Village, or HERE at the EDGE:Cam site.

Also – check out what QAT have to say about where we can go with CA-Gen and the Web.

BUT – the highlight of yesterday MUST be John Swainson’s foray into Second Life - maybe people DO need a Second Life after all  – maybe he’ll join us sometime !!!!

One of the great things about the site is the “Solutions Finder” – a simple, easy-to-use drop set of questions to answer, which will recommend which of the QAT/Jumar portfolio of products you can use to carry out your application engineering wishes! In addition, there are whitepapers and articles from various sources that can be downloaded and viewed offline that will help people manage their investment in Gen and move it forward.

I haven’t explored the whole site, but its looking like this will develop and grow into a great way for getting at top-flight Gen consultancy, products and information.

* for a reminder how YOU can post to this site AND the Gen Village during CA World 2008, see here *

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APG was a vendor who I first became aware of 18 months ago. I’ve looked at their technology, and have been lucky enough to visit their offices in Vienna, and made some good friends there.

The technology that has been crafted by this skillful team needs to be seen to be believed – and you can at CA World 2008 !

This time, at CA World,  APG will have their own labs.

Labs allow you to see  the power of the tooling and what is possible – they give a first hand experience of what the tools can do and how they really to bring systems from years ago right up to date with Gen !

You can find APG at their stand (number 422B) in the exhibition hall – let them know you’re a Gentalk reader – in the meantime read more about their labs here.

MG115SN: ModelCVS: Legacy Renewal – Transformation from a PL/1 system into CA Gen
Date/Time: Wednesday, November 19, 2008, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM
MG120LN: ModelCVS: CA Gen Enhancements Lab Part I
Date/Time: Tuesday, November 18, 2008, 9:45 AM – 10:45 AM
MG121LN: ModelCVS: CA Gen Enhancements Lab Part II
Date/Time: Tuesday, November 18, 2008, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM

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At the same time as the EDGE Reception in Las Vegas, there will be an event in Second Life which will hopefully have a live (or semi-live) feed into the EDGE Reception as the Venetian Hotel. There is already an event venue being constructed over the next 2 weeks within the Gen Village.

Registration (free) is already open from the web, or in-world.

If the technology works OK, then we should have communication between the EDGE Reception (both ways audio and one-way video) so we can be part of it even though we wont physically be there!

Keep watching this space for more news…..

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QA Console from Response Systems is an add-on to their existing software portfolio that can scan code to see if it fits site standards.
There are a bunch of inbuilt coding standard checks that come with the tool, but there exists a facility to build your own checks and standards which are then incorporated into the tool using the SDK supplied.
In addition, new checks will be downloadable from the Response Systems website.

Once objects that fail checks are identified, some of them can be corrected by using the auto-correct feature of the tool, eliminating the need for human intervention!

A great productivity tool, one which will save developers many hours of code reviews and improve code quality, and ultimately, code stability and supportability, and many other benefits aside.

Read the press release here and the forum entry here.

Don’t forget to see the demos at CAWorld 2008.

Sessions: [EC806EN : 16.11.08 : 1.15pm - 5.15pm] and [MG123LN : 18.11.08 : 8:30am - 9:30am]

Since I can’t be at CA World 2008, I’m hoping that people that go will be able to report and post their content directly from CA World onto the internet from this blog site, for the benefit of Genners worldwide.

There are a number of ways that you can report :

1)       email: You can email caw2008@gentalk.biz – the Subject of your email will become the title of the post, and you can add 1 email attachment, such as a picture. Note that this must be an attachment, not an in-line image, which won’t work!

2)       flickr: You can email hold18ice@photos.flickr.com any number of pictures – the subject line becomes the title of the picture and the body of the email becomes the description.

3)       Second Life: You can log on to Second Life and click on the CA World 2008 Feedback device in the Mini CA World 2008 area of the Gen Village.

4)       web: Head over to http://gentalk.biz/blog/secondlife/WEB-CAW2008-microblog.php to register a comment (single lines only)

Both (3) and (4) will be displayed as “microblogs” in the right hand sidebar of the gentalk.biz, (2) will allow the pictures to be displayed as a random Flickr Feed in the sidebar, but (1) will be a fully-fledged blog post!.

Some of these mechanisms can be achieved from mobile devices, right from within the centre of the action!

Note that there will be some delays in the main blogs appearing in the site, as they need to be approved by me, but I’ll only be checking spelling and layout, to make it compatible with the rest of the site, the pictures will refresh each hour, and the microblogs (since they rely on CAPTCHA technology) will be instant.

As usual with these tools, and abusive or unsavoury content will be removed as soon as I am aware of it (should any get through).

I’m hoping that those not fortunate enough to get to Las Vegas this time can at least soak up some of the atmosphere by those kind enough to post snippets here, and also hoping that we can get a live feed (somehow) from CA World 2008 – watch this space!

PS – if anyone is thinking about posting videos, please don’t use the mechanisms described above – contact me directly on info@gentalk.biz and we can discuss an alternative route.

As a result of attending CA World 2007 in the wonderful Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas that I was inspired to start what became Gentalk.biz.  I really can’t put words to how valuable CA World is for networking, meeting with CA insiders, and many eco-system vendors, such as Jumar Solutions, IET, APG, Canam, Facet and others, and getting the low-down on what people are doing, not just with Gen, but with all the other CA tools.

If you haven’t signed up yet, use this link.

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Hopefully they should be resolved now and I can look forward to the Gen Network dinner in Solihull without worries!

Duration 60 min.

Learn how to deploy and invoke a .NET proxy as a web service within IIS. The process is simple and can be used to easily access CA Gen servers with a web service interface. Using a .NET proxy does not limit support to just .NET Servers, the proxy is capable of accessing most CA Gen generated server platforms. This should interest any development groups looking for a quick and simple way to turn their existing servers into web services.

Register now

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I have known Andy (as have many other Genners) for a number of years and can only add to the superlatives that have been bestowed on him!

His presence in Jumar will be an incredible asset to them – congratulations to both !

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We read this week of the alliance between Jumar Solutions (in the UK) and Facet in (Australia).

Such alliances are common within this industry and this one in particular will (I think!!) bring benefits (obviously) to both companies, but, to us “users” the benefits are (again – in MY opinion) even bigger.

Jumar’s solutions have allowed many organisations to complete projects that they would not have been able to unless the experience of Jumar and their unique tools were there behind them.

Facet also have long experience of Gen, participating in many large projects with Gen, so are aware of the challenges that it presents.

So – what IS the benefit going to be for the users ?

Well – get any 2 people who know a subject in-depth (or are acknowledged experts in a specific field) in a room and let them talk for an hour – then see what comes out!

So – Jumar and Facet – acknowledged experts in their fields and who know their subjects inside-out .

There will, no doubt, be more to come from these two companies – but in the first instance, both will be able to bring their individual skills to each other’s marketplace, creating a gobal availability for extremely skilled Gen resouces.

Increased availability of skilled resources is VERY definitely a great thing for the Gen arena! – Long may it continue.

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The feed is displayed on the Gentalk.biz website and is also available in-world.

Now this is available to you. Simply use the http://news.genvillage.gentalk.biz url in your newsreader and that’s it !

If you want to be part of the Gen Village community and post directly to the Gentalk.biz site, thereby being part of Gentalk.biz, email info@gentalk.biz for a bracelet – as shown highlighted in red in the picture.

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WHY ?
I have never understood this! Since becoming exposed to Gen in the mid-1990’s I have always seen the benefit of modelling and code generation and deployment in the same toolset.

Quite why any organisation would want to return to hand-crafting code for enterprise-scale applications is beyond me.

As I see it, any benefits that once might have been gained by manual coding in a high level language will be washed away by a Model Based Development approach like Gen, with its productivity and platform independence.

I really would like to understand the thought processes that go into a decision to remove Gen from an organisation’s estate – perhaps some readers of this can enlighten me by posting comments!

Q1) Should organisations who want to transform their business use Java ?

A1) Yes – why not?

Q2) How should organisations transform their business with Java ?

A2) MMMMmmmm – choices – choices – choices….
The result of this choices issue is that an organisation could choose to migrate their existing applications (maybe mainfame green-screen) directly to hand-crafted Java code, or maybe use a toolset to do this (such as those from Metex and FreeSoft among others).

These tools are no doubt successful and have good track records. BUT what happens 5 years hence, and there is a “new” Java – whatever will be “strategic” then – let’s say “.Net” ?

Another migration, along with all the training and so on that a project of that sort requires ? Yup – that’s reality!

If the organisation had chosen to migrate the application into Gen at the outset, then when the new strategy comes along, the organisation simply deploys into that technology instead.

The costs of migrating to Gen may be higher at the start, but over time, the benefits of technology independance will outweigh them.

This is already well know among the Gen community, but less well publicised outside of it.

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To register, either go to the Gen Village in-world and find the Gen Gathering Registration Booth in front of the auditorium, or register on the Web – click the button below:

The web form uses CAPTCHA technology to ensure that no automated robots register, and will request your email address for a document containing your registration confirmation – be there!!!

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At CA World 2008

Register today to save $200!  Hurry as Early Bird Registration ends September 19th. Receive an additional $200 discount off registration cost for EDGE members. (It is not too late to join EDGE and take advantage of the discount, go to www.edgeusergroup.org today.)  Total registration savings is $400 if you register by September 19th !

Attend more than 23 dedicated CA Gen sessions, 5 labs and 2 FREE CA Gen pre-conference Education courses.  PLEASE NOTE! An additional registration is required for the free pre-conference Education Sessions:

• EC806EN - Using CA Gen to Implement a Cost-Effective Enterprise Architecture
• EC807EN - Taking CA Gen Applications to the Web, Now and in the Future

Don’t miss the ever popular EDGE Reception on Monday, November 17 from 5-7:00 p.m.!

This year CA Gen is in the Mainframe and Multi-Platform Application Development Focus Area. Check out the Web site at: www.ca.com/caworld. This will be the only EDGE conference this year, so be there !!!

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• Reduce
• Reuse
• Recycle

The latent value that is in people’s Gen systems is vast – its usually cheaper to modernise existing systems than craft new ones, and it fits in with the “green” ethos in a surprising number of ways.
 
The preparation for modernisation is as important with Gen as it is with any other technology, and it is a MUST that there is a “Champion” in the organisation who can drive the modernisation forward.

Applications are written in many different ways, some following in-house standards, some following no standards at all, but ALL applications need to be examined to understand what changes are required to them to enable them to fit with the new in-house application standards.

Once those standards have been established, it follows that a rolling programme of re-architecting applications could be embarked on, but always remembering that the new applications being built should adhere to those standards too. Doing so will allow a reduction in effort later on if those applications are to be modernised.

Gen applications fit into the “green” ethos simply because components of the applications can be deployed in many different technologies, and different paradigms – 3270, Client/Server and Web – so there is a reduction in the lines of code that need to be written to support different technologies. In addition, the systems can easily be modernised, reducing the need to create NEW code and reusing what is already there for a different purpose.

So:

• Reduce  -  The effort required by designing applications with modernisation in mind  
• Reuse   -  Components of existing applications to form new ones
• Recycle -  The applications when they are modernised in a different paradigm

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• Introduction and Keynote Speech
• ModelCVS by APG
• Advanced Gen Systems Model Analysis
• Bringing Gen into an SOA

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

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Register here

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This is a 100+ page PDF document containing all the slides from the initial keynote speech though to the last slide of the evening. Download it now !

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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.

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• 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!!!!!

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• Today at 11:57am UK Time, the gentalk.biz website hit 25000 !!! To see how the traffic around the site has increased, see here. Many thanks to all those who take the time and trouble to look at it and hope that you all find it useful !
• Almost to coincide with this, the server that hosts gentalk.biz at around 11:30 UK time had a memory blip and caused a process to endlessly loop, with the result that the site went down for a period of around 30 minutes – apologies for that – it should now be sorted out !
• Don’t forget that the Grand re-Opening of the Gen Village is happening next Tuesday – the agenda is still being firmed up but is looking pretty much done now.
• The next CA webcast on developing plugins for CA-Gen is also takikng place next week – see here

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Use the links in the sidebar to get more information, or click here for a “Press Release”.