Release 8.8 of the IET DevOps Suite (includes GuardIEn and other products previously installed with GuardIEn) is now available.

Highlights of the new release are detailed below and full details are available in the Release Notes which can be downloaded from here: https://www.iet.uk/Download/RelNotes.htm

64 bit Windows Servers

• The Windows servers are now 64-bit.
  

• Release 8.7 introduced a new web service API for the CSE installations that allowed programmatic access to GuardIEn Change Requests, Release Pack and System Update functions. In this release, the range of APIs has been extended to provide an API for C, Java and .Net via standard CA Gen proxies. The GuardIEn API is a separate download that contains the proxy interfaces and web service WSDL.
  

• To accommodate longer passwords and passphrases, the length of the GuardIEn userid password, encyclopaedia connection password and encyclopaedia FTP password has been changed to 100 characters and spaces are now supported in the password.
  

• In previous releases, text searches that used a SQL LIKE (for example searching text or names in Object List+ or names in Deliverable List) automatically appended a trailing ‘%’ in the search string. This reduced flexibility in the searches, for example by not allowing a search for a specific end string. A trailing % is no longer appended to the search string if it already contains a ‘%’ or ‘&’, so if you want to search for a string that is in the middle of a value, you will need to add a trailing %, i.e. search for ‘%XXX%’ not ‘%XXX’
  

IET are pleased to announce the availabilty of the IET DevOps Suite.

IET DevOps Suite



To reflect the integrated nature of the IET products and the fact that multiple products are installed with GuardIEn (for example VerifIEr, pathvIEw, genIE and Object List+) plus the ability to integrate Studio Developer with other IET products, these products have been grouped together for installation purposes as the IET DevOps Suite where previously they were installed as part of GuardIEn.

DevOps Studio

The CA Gen Studio based plug-ins (Studio Developer and Studio GuardIEn) are now called DevOps Studio. 

The DevOps Studio clients are now installed as part of the IET DevOps Suite clients (previously the GuardIEn clients). The Eclipse based user interface provided in Studio offers a more productive and integrated user experience compared to the normal Windows GUI clients, especially when combined with Studio Developer. If the workstation has CA Gen Studio installed, all users of GuardIEn, VerifIEr, pathvIEw and other DevOps Suite products can (and are encouraged to) use the new Studio interface.

Release 8.7 Service Pack 5 is now available to download. You can view the release notes here: https://www.iet.uk/Download/RelNotes.htm

IET recommend that you install the service pack to obtain the latest fixes.

IET will be participating in the forthcoming CA Gen in DevOps Panel Interview hosted by the CA Edge Community and Broadcom on 9th June.

Please join us as we discuss CA Gen in the enterprise DevOps lifecycle. This will be a continuation of conversations started by Broadcom with their CA Gen DevOps paper, based on an internal proof of concept of integrating CA Gen and Endevor.

Hosted by Kim Peelman, Product Owner, CA Gen,  the panel will share further insights about CA Gen and DevOps and also have an open discussion with attendees on DevOps requirements and seeking feedbakc to help with the direction of future initiatives around DevOps support.

The panellists are:

• Darius Panahy: Director at IET with extensive experience enabling CA Gen customers to embrace DevOps using GuardIEn.
  
• Dillon Harguess: Architect and Engineer for CA Gen who contributed to the recent proof-of-concept demonstrating building a z/OS CICS Blockmode Application with CA Endevor and Zowe.
  
• Su Brude: Product Manager for CA Gen, guiding the vision to deliver value to customers.
  
• Vaughn Marshall: Broadcom’s Product Manager for CA Endevor, an enterprise solution for source code and release management for z/OS.
  

In previous IET product releases our approach has been to provide a stable interface between client and server software so that customers could upgrade the servers to obtain the latest enhancements and fixes but did not also have to upgrade the clients. For example, a GuardIEn 8.7.0 release of the client could be used with any service pack release of the servers. The only pre-requisites were that the client release had to be at the same major version (i.e. 8.7) and also at the same level or lower than the server release.

This approach, created to reduce the upgrade impact of service packs for customers, inevitably resulted in some constraints on the nature of changes that could be made within a release: some enhancements required a change to both clients and servers and hence could only be delivered in the next major release.

Up until now we typically planned our major releases to coincide with a new release of CA Gen. However, with Broadcom moving to a Continuous Delivery (CD) approach for CA Gen, we have decided to also make some changes to our delivery approach.

IET will now support two concurrent releases with the following characteristics:

The ‘Maintenance’ Release

• The maintenance release will only receive fixes to existing functionality.
  
• A service pack upgrade will not require a client upgrade when the server is upgraded.
  
• The current Maintenance release is 8.7.
  

• The CD release will receive new features and enhancements (as well as fixes to existing functionality).
  
• A service pack upgrade may require a client upgrade (i.e. if upgrading from 8.8.0 to 8.8.1, it may be necessary to upgrade both clients and servers).
  
• New CA Gen features requiring a corresponding enhancement in our products might only be supported in the CD release.
  
• The first CD release will be 8.8, scheduled for launch in Q3 2021.
  
• Third-party pre-requisite software will not be changed within a major release.
  

With Gen 8.6 support announced for Oracle 19, a number of customers have asked about GuardIEn support for newer Oracle versions.

GuardIEn 8.7 uses the Oracle 12c sql*net client. As long as you are using sql*net 12c 12.2.0 or higher, this is compatible with Oracle Server 12.2.0 up to and including 21c. If you are using 12.2.0 then this is also compatible but fixes are only provided with Extended Support. Consult the Oracle Compatibility Matrix on support.oracle.com for further details.

All of us at IET wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

   

Instead of posting cards, we are making a donation to our wonderful local hospice Dorothy House.

Studio Developer 8.7.4.0007 introduces a new feature for DDL Generation.

You can now set the generation mode to ‘Alter Column’. This compares the columns in the model database design with a physical database and generates ALTER TABLE DDL for new, removed and modified columns.

   

xTrace 2.6.0 is now available. 

The main change in this release is that the Monitor and Windows xtService have been upgraded to use Visual Studio 2015 and CA Gen 8.6 runtimes.

A new version of the xTrace host runtime has also been produced but the 2.6 Monitor is compatible with earlier releases of the xtService and host runtime software and therefore the Monitor can be upgraded without needing to upgrade the host software.

It is recommended that you install the 2.6.0 host software since future fixes and enhancements will be provided to the 2.6 release.

Studio Developer is a modern Eclipse based alternative to the CA Gen toolset. Designed to be easier to use and learn, Studio Developer has been enthusiastically adopted by several CA Gen sites who report very positive feedback from both new and experienced developers. 

To help train new developers in CA Gen, IET have started to produce a series of short videos that show how to build applications using CA Gen with Studio Developer.

Each module will be concise with the idea that a new developer can watch the video and then practice the concepts learnt.

The first module is now available. In this module we dive straight in and build a simple 'Hello World' application. Future modules will cover concepts like action diagramming, common action blocks, UI design, views, data modelling, client/server and more.

The videos are available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...k_mZDIZ8sS

For best results, please adjust the video quality to 1080p when playing the videos.

We welcome feedback on the format of the videos.