Gen Reviews

It's an extremely rapid development software tool with a lot of enterprise-level software maintenance functionality. It is similar to the software that was used in all of the impact analysis stuff that's really necessary in an enterprise world. In terms of impact analysis, this is an old tool. It actually came out originally as IEF (Information Engineering Facility) in the late 1980s or early 1990s. (The name was later changed to Cool.Gen and then to CA Gen.) A lot of big systems were built upon it. When you go to make changes in these systems, you need to know what you're going to impact so you can test it effectively and make sure you don't make a mistake because a bug in a production environment can frequently be a very high cost issue. You see that all the time. People make changes and their systems come down. The airline systems of late have been big in that. This tool facilitates you knowing where your impact is as opposed to you guessing where your impact is. It's lived long beyond what people thought was its life expectancy as a product, largely because it is such a quality tool that people can't replace. It would take, I would estimate, three times the number of developers to maintain the C code that it generates than it does to maintain the other codes.

CA Gen, at least where I work, is used in a way that causes predictable production implementations.  The tool supports extensive and predictable impact analysis. Other tools from partners capture changes and make promotions precise.

.Net is a great language and the Team Foundation tools are great but the merge process is not perfect. Backing out changes in an environment were multiple people can work on the same code can be problematic.

The tool is so mature that the production implementation environments around it are very mature as well. I work in a shop that has some CA Gen and some .NET and there's always problems on the .NET side when they go to production. For instance, the day after production is always a nightmare. That's not really true with CA Gen stuff, generally speaking. There are exceptions to that. It is a mature tool that lets you feel confident in making changes and putting them in production.

If you're going to build a mission critical project, the tools that you're using are very important. You need qualified developers but the tools are critical.

With CA Gen you can model the application lifecycle and leave the application development to the next level of abstraction. You can develop multiple platform projects like on the server side and client side. If you imagine that your application needs the server side and the client side. Both of them will be working in different frameworks, or with different platforms. You can write Kobo, Java, and Windows applications in the same tool with one team, rather than three separate different teams. It gives agility, and cost effectiveness.

The benefit is the mobility. You can shift one platform to another without any extra effort. You can shift from mainframe, to Java without giving any extra effort.

We are using CA Gen on the client side and the mainframe side. 

On the client side we are producing C source code and on the mainframe side we are producing COBOL source. We have been using CA Gen over 25 years in Turkey. As far as I know, we are the only user in Turkey. We are implementing CBD methodology (Component Based Development).

The performance is very nice. Especially if you are implementing the right architecture for it, you can easily manage all the changes, all the requests. We are now trying to change our architecture, especially the mainframe sites, because our business side is changing rapidly and we need to change our methods from static to dynamic. We are now working on that.

As a developer, it is wonderful. Coding on CA Gen is easy. If you want to change anything, you can easily manage the code and you can easily find other changes, other group changes, other models, other components.

CA Gen is an advanced version of Advantage Gen/COOL Gen/IEF, which were tools for rapid application development in mainframes and a client/server environment. CA Gen has added web development capability.

Advantage Gen greatly enhanced productivity as well as development of solutions in mainframes, Client, and server applications. However, it was lacking the web development features, which has been provided by CA Gen.

The most valuable feature is the faster time to deliver a product than tradition COBOL programming. We use CA Gen pretty much for everything, including data modeling, moving the code to production, and as a migration tool. We use all of the CA Gen features. We can write a mainframe application, GUI applications, everything.

We're able to have faster delivery and quickly develop a product with higher quality.

The so-called full packets, so you can develop software and systems using these packets, and implement software on the mainframe side and the client side. You can use the same packets, so it's very powerful.

Nowadays, it's internet and websites, it's very common. I think they have to make this product more and more flexible to use it in the web as well. I think that’s very important for the future.