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.

A new Remote Generation feature has been added to GuardIEn for the Host Encyclopaedia in Release 8.7.4.

Code generation on the CA Gen Host Encyclopaedia is limited to MVS/COBOL target environments. This means that if you need to generate code for other platforms (for example clients, proxies or non-MVS server environments), you have to download models or subsets to generate code locally on the toolset. This approach requires manual intervention by a developer and has been practically impossible to automate until now with the release of GuardIEn Remote Generation and Studio Developer Automated Generation.

Remote Generation is a new component of GuardIEn's automated system updating facility which enables the generation of code remotely. The remote generation step automatically scopes and downloads a subset containing those objects that need to be regenerated along with a control file which specifies what objects require generation and installation.

Automated Generation is a new feature in Studio Developer which automatically checks for the remote generation control files (which have been transferred to the workstation by GuardIEn) and then prepares the subset and generates / installs the code as specified in the control file. 

With the combination of GuardIEn Remote Generation and Studio Developer Automated Generation, users of the CA Gen host encyclopaedia can now completely automate the generation and build of their application across all target platforms - clients, proxies, web services and both MVS and non-MVS server code.

   

Release 8.7.4 brings a new feature to Studio Developer - Automated Generation.

Studio Developer Automated Generation enables code generation and build process to be automatically initiated based on data in a control file. When the control file is transferred to a folder on the workstation, the generate and build process is automatically started by the Studio Developer Automated Generation Monitor. It can be used in combination with the GuardIEn Host Encyclopaedia Remote Generation feature or the control files can be created using other methods.

The CA Gen Host Encyclopaedia (HE) only supports direct generation for MVS targets, so non-MVS code (for example GUI or Web clients, proxies or non-MVS servers) cannot be generated directly from the HE. GuardIEn on the Host Encyclopaedia incorporates a new feature for system updating called Remote Generation which creates the control files and performs the subset scoping and download tasks to be able to automatically perform the generation and build using Studio Developer Automated Generation.

   

New service packs have been released for Release 8.7 (SP4) and Release 8.6 (SP10).