Some gaming on the side.....
Yeap. For the 2E and Plexers out there I am afraid I am between opportunities at the moment so am not using the tools on a daily basis. In the meantime I have turned my hand to a second love of mine.
Making computer games.
Some of you may know that I have written games in the past. I remember demonstrating/hassling my colleagues way back when I was working in London as I was creating a game. 6 months of sweat (some tears) later...... I published a shoot em up (Galaxian style) in 1999 for my cousin who was 13 and totally chuffed when he realised that he could blow up his parents on Level 5 (Phase III).
I am pleased to say that some years later he turned out to be of sound character so killing his virtual parents never crossed contaminated his real word views. :-)
At the time I used a tool called "The Games Factory". This was a IDE and engine rolled into one and it allowed you to create a game (at that time it targeted windows). This tool has had a second version and updates ever since and has also been superseded by a tool called "Multimedia Fusion 2".
Nowadays, this tool can create games for Web, Android, iOS (iPad and iPhone) as well as XNA for windows devices.
I decide to blog a little about this as the concept of these types of tools is not too far removed from the ideals behind the 2E and Plex tools (technology insulation, templates, productivity) to name a few of the key features over raw coding. I am currently using two additional tools from www.gamesalad.com and www.stencyl.com. Both tools are aimed for lowering the threshold to get into games creation for your favourite devices.
The irony for me is the forums I take part in have the same debates that defenders of 2E and Plex have endured over the years. i.e. 3GL coding versus 4GL code generation. Numerous times I have had to draw the comparisons for this generation Y or whatever we are calling youth now.
In one camp is the (take Apple) XCode only guys who have hand crafted every element of the game engine and experience, whereas, on the other side are Stencylites or Saladers who believe in gameplay and quality graphics etc etc.
As always it depends on the project, timescale, developer capability and you guessed it, no one solution to fit all scenarios or game types, they all have there limits, learning curves and price point.
The grand daddy of 3d games in this space (hobby, Independent to Studio) is Unity but that also comes with a price tag to match. Still all of these are cheaper than licensing a 3rd party engine like Unreal.
On the gaming side of my life at the moment I hit issues with game performance that require tuning, features that are not yet in the tools but on the roadmap and eagerly awaiting updates, 3GL vs 4GL debates within forums etc etc. In a way a parallel universe to my professional life using 2E and Plex.
If any of you 2E and Plex guru's out there fancy doing something a little different you'd not do much better than the tools I have mentioned. Unless you are a coder coder and therefore you can utilise some of the SDK's and chose your relevant physics engine for example :-)
Now I just need an excuse to integrate a Plex or 2E server application within a game and be the first person to integrate these technologies......
When the game I am building hits the stores I'll be sure to let you know.
Thanks for reading.
Lee.
Edit 1 - Fixed up a few typo's
Edit 2 - There is also another SDK of interest called CoronaSDK which bridges the gap between the 3GL approach and the 4GL approach. It's effectively uses and intermediate language that then compiles and uses runtimes for the relevant devices, all packaged neatly and available to download from an app store near you. Check it out www.coronalabs.com
A blog devoted to CA 2e (Synon) or CA Plex.
Showing posts with label 4GL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 4GL. Show all posts
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Saturday, May 31, 2008
The Great 3GL v 4GL debate - Part III
This is part III of a trilogy of articles regarding the usage and evolution of software development languages. Part I can be found here and part II here.
All of these technologies have issues to address. 20 years ago we were all happy with green screens for business applications with centralised platforms, then came client server with Windows and the distributed computing model became mainstream. Then along came the Internet and the return to HTML thin clients and now the evolution once more learns towards Rich/Smart clients.
The irony for me as that I have witnessed many people move on from the 4GL world of the nineties to emerging 3GL (albeit object based) technologies i.e. J2EE (Java) and .NET compatible languages etc.
With the extra layers of complication (some call it abstraction) added due to business usage of the internet I am seeing more and more tools coming onto the market that claim ‘code generation’ capabilities. You only have to look at the OMG’s ever growing list to see that once again people are looking for the holy grail of application creation as projects overrun and costs escalate.
I do see a trend towards total code generation once more. IBM has launched a 4GL called EGL. This looked quite promising and might me worth a look but to me it is not yet as mature as others.
The difference between tools like Plex/2e and this new breed of tools is that the ‘so called’ newer tools generally only cater for the singular environment and often really only create the initial code that requires manual intervention and coding in the generated language. In my mind, these tools have yet to evolve as far down the road as Plex/2e.
Plex and 2e both have their unique selling points.
2E is pretty easy to use and probably has a 3-6 months learning curve for a developer to become very proficient. Quicker with excellent training and in-house support. Software development room 101. Item 3. Always spend decent money getting a guru to help you set up your environment and train the developers. Too often mistakes are made is the early stages of application development. This is especially true when using new tools.
Plex will take longer (12 to 18 months) as it supports inheritance, shipped and customer business patterns, meta coding and many more target development platforms. It really is the Daddy of ARAD (Architected Rapid Application Development), hence the learning curve but the payback after this is judged in weeks, months or even years off a development projects timeline. And with the great pricing of the tool and generators nowadays, it really is an option to help protect you against the constant upskilling costs associated with other technologies.
When you also consider that the tool has localisation, application version partitioning built into the tool. From the single skill set perspective your developers will always remain current. That said, you would always create the optimum patterns and platform level code if some of your developers have the lower level skills.
I have been programming computer systems in Plex and 2e for 16 years and these systems have used the best aspects of these tools and have always been database focused applications.
These have been in Finance and Banking, Debt Management, Mortgage Application and Processing, MIS, Project Management, Time Recording and Environment Management. These were deployed on System I (now IBM Power System with ‘i’ as the operating system (RPG and RPG ILE code), Java, C++ server code all with either C++ or Java (Swing) clients.
With the plans for these tools heading towards .NET C# clients and the C# server code in 6.0 already available. The recent announcement of the WebClient partnership between ADC Austin and Websydian means that the future looks really bright.
Time will tell what will happen and often these battles are not won or lost by the technologies, often they are decided by the marketing budgets.
However, I know what playground I want to play in. And if you need a guru to help you. You should contact me.
Thanks for reading.
Lee.
All of these technologies have issues to address. 20 years ago we were all happy with green screens for business applications with centralised platforms, then came client server with Windows and the distributed computing model became mainstream. Then along came the Internet and the return to HTML thin clients and now the evolution once more learns towards Rich/Smart clients.
The irony for me as that I have witnessed many people move on from the 4GL world of the nineties to emerging 3GL (albeit object based) technologies i.e. J2EE (Java) and .NET compatible languages etc.
With the extra layers of complication (some call it abstraction) added due to business usage of the internet I am seeing more and more tools coming onto the market that claim ‘code generation’ capabilities. You only have to look at the OMG’s ever growing list to see that once again people are looking for the holy grail of application creation as projects overrun and costs escalate.
I do see a trend towards total code generation once more. IBM has launched a 4GL called EGL. This looked quite promising and might me worth a look but to me it is not yet as mature as others.
The difference between tools like Plex/2e and this new breed of tools is that the ‘so called’ newer tools generally only cater for the singular environment and often really only create the initial code that requires manual intervention and coding in the generated language. In my mind, these tools have yet to evolve as far down the road as Plex/2e.
Plex and 2e both have their unique selling points.
2E is pretty easy to use and probably has a 3-6 months learning curve for a developer to become very proficient. Quicker with excellent training and in-house support. Software development room 101. Item 3. Always spend decent money getting a guru to help you set up your environment and train the developers. Too often mistakes are made is the early stages of application development. This is especially true when using new tools.
Plex will take longer (12 to 18 months) as it supports inheritance, shipped and customer business patterns, meta coding and many more target development platforms. It really is the Daddy of ARAD (Architected Rapid Application Development), hence the learning curve but the payback after this is judged in weeks, months or even years off a development projects timeline. And with the great pricing of the tool and generators nowadays, it really is an option to help protect you against the constant upskilling costs associated with other technologies.
When you also consider that the tool has localisation, application version partitioning built into the tool. From the single skill set perspective your developers will always remain current. That said, you would always create the optimum patterns and platform level code if some of your developers have the lower level skills.
I have been programming computer systems in Plex and 2e for 16 years and these systems have used the best aspects of these tools and have always been database focused applications.
These have been in Finance and Banking, Debt Management, Mortgage Application and Processing, MIS, Project Management, Time Recording and Environment Management. These were deployed on System I (now IBM Power System with ‘i’ as the operating system (RPG and RPG ILE code), Java, C++ server code all with either C++ or Java (Swing) clients.
With the plans for these tools heading towards .NET C# clients and the C# server code in 6.0 already available. The recent announcement of the WebClient partnership between ADC Austin and Websydian means that the future looks really bright.
Time will tell what will happen and often these battles are not won or lost by the technologies, often they are decided by the marketing budgets.
However, I know what playground I want to play in. And if you need a guru to help you. You should contact me.
Thanks for reading.
Lee.
Monday, May 12, 2008
The Great 3GL v 4GL debate - Part II
This is part II of a trilogy of articles regarding the usage and evolution of software development languages. Part I can be found here.
So what are the benefits or otherwise of using a 3GL over a 4GL and visa versa. For me it certainly depends on all the usual factors that drive any technology decision. Cost of product, support, flexibility, the human factor, tool lifecycle, vendor direction and target platforms being a few that come to mind instantaneously.
The Pro’s of a 3GL
Embedded or mission critical applications like Air Traffic Control systems are generally handcrafted and more suited to a 3GL environment, as are operating systems, 4GL tools themselves (debatable), communications, hardware drivers and generally non database applications. As the developers have access to all the API’s and are that step closer to the CPU, they generally have wider usage opportunities.
Accessibility to wider developer pool. Whilst there are probably thousands of developers for your chosen 4GL, possibly even tens of thousands. These tools simply do not have the numbers associated to mainstream development languages and IDE’s. There is an estimated 4 to 5 million developers following the evolution of Java and no doubt Microsoft can boast even more for its most popular products. That said, of course, this also means that it is also harder to find a guru within that skills ocean, not to mention, filtering out those who have spent 15 minutes in the IDE and now claim some form of exposure on their curriculum vitae.
3GL’s are quicker to react to emerging markets and development trends. Generally the suppliers of these 3GL tools are inventing the future. They don’t often agree with each other but they certainly have the advantage over the 4GL creator. These guys have to wait and see what technology actually matures beyond the marketing hype and into mainstream best practice before committing to provide code generation for that area.
Flexibility. Languages at 3GL level, depending on the targeted platform, have virtually no restrictions with the type of application that can be written and how they are written. This means that applications where speed of performance is the critical measurement of success then it is most likely that a 4GL will fall short of the handwritten targeted code.
The Pro’s of a 4GL
Business rules focused development. Once you have learnt the code generators quirks you are in a situation where you mainly tackle your development from the business domain and you allow the code generator to handle the technical implementation. With this comes a significant reduction in the amount of time required to build an application. Many will say that there are standards and frameworks that help with 3GL development. This is actually quite true, but, also be aware that the code generator vendor will be skilled with the major best practices and will write more consistent code. Some may argue that the code is not as neat as code written by a good developer and in the regard, I quite agree. I will say that the underlying code will be written in the same way and style, therefore, after a while all the developers will become conversant in how the code is generated, that is, if they want or need to understand. (See Below)
Complexity avoidance. A 4GL will protect the majority of the developers using the tools from the underlying complexities of the generated language. When you couple this with the ability to influence how the code is generated using patterns, have the ability to take the design model from the 4GL and transform that into other language code, your business logic can truly be ported from platform to platform as trends become reality and your technical needs change.
Impact Analysis. For me this is one of the key features of using a 4GL tool. Generally these tools use a database to store design and program artefacts that are then transformed in the language code. Every reference for every field, File/Table, Access Path/Index/View, Function/Object/Program is stored in the repository and a developer can track each and every item through to where and how they are used. This is a powerful feature that cannot be overlooked versus manual reviewing of language source files.
Trusting the generator. When I train people to use CA 2E or CA Plex the defining moment for gauging the developers progress and understanding is the day that they learn to trust the generator. As with any tool, a badly constructed function in 2E, for example, can create badly generated and non compilable code. Once the developer realises that it is generally their fault if a generation of code fails they’re ready to move forward. If have seen far to many 3GL programmers migrate to the 4GL paradigm only to get bogged down into the details of the code produced, yet they will trust the compiler without hesitation. With the ability to change a shared function or the domain of a field and then apply detailed automated impact analysis to identify all affected programs, press a button to regenerate and compile all programs and database files affected is a very powerful feature.
The Con’s of a 3GL
Slower, more expensive development. The very nature and size of modern 3GL languages and their flexibility is also their Achilles Heel as there are so many ways to resolve a programming issue with literally thousands of opinions and many directions. In a nutshell for certain types of applications, particularly those that involve the extensive usage of a database, the ROI for using a 3GL versus a 4GL is very poor indeed. To contra some of the cost debate, 4GL tools are generally more expensive to purchase. The most expensive item in any development team is the human, even if it has been outsourced to an emerging development powerhouse.
You will spend more time debugging the application. A very good ex-colleague of mine once said “If the art of debugging is the removal of bugs from programs, then programming must be the art of putting them there in the first place.” Because we are relying on the developer to code all aspects of the application it is likely to cause some issues along the way. It is generally the developer’s prerogative to deal with memory leaks and usage in languages like Java or C++ but with a 4GL it would be the code generators responsibility.
Complexity. Once again due to the size of the languages and their strong reach it is unlikely that you will find developers that know all the aspects required to complete an application. Your staffing needs are generally much higher and the learning curve for the 3GL would be very significant indeed. This means that the developers must understand many technical as well as business problems.
The Con’s of a 4GL
Vendor lock in. Depending on the vendor this can be quite a significant issue. If the vendors are too slow to react to emerging technologies you will find yourself with a heterogeneous development environment and you will lose many of the advantages referred to above with regard to complexity protection and highly detailed impact analysis. Worse still, your vendor may well decide to stop production of the 4GL or chose other directions as the options with technology deployment balloon. These tools are often criticised as proprietary.
Flexibility. There will be limitations with the scope of applications that can be created by a single 4GL. There are of course others that target different platforms and purposes. Their flexibility is often measured in the lowest common denominator for which they have to support/generate code for. For example a generator that generates code for three different platforms may have to limit what can be done in one language due to limitations in another. For example different languages may have differing maximum field lengths meaning that for generic code construction in the 4GL platform x and y can only size fields to the limits of platform z.
Source Code. Many 3GL developers will argue that the code is not user friendly, bloated and often too generic in comparison to hand-written code. This can be true of some code generators and is certainly something that needs to be considered when choosing an approach for your development.
All of the above are by no sense of the imagine a definite list. Given time, I believe that I could have produced a list of 20+ Pro’s and Con’s for each approach.
Part III will discuss trends, fads and conclude the 3GL and 4GL debate with my own personal viewpoint.
Thanks for reading.
Lee.
So what are the benefits or otherwise of using a 3GL over a 4GL and visa versa. For me it certainly depends on all the usual factors that drive any technology decision. Cost of product, support, flexibility, the human factor, tool lifecycle, vendor direction and target platforms being a few that come to mind instantaneously.
The Pro’s of a 3GL
Embedded or mission critical applications like Air Traffic Control systems are generally handcrafted and more suited to a 3GL environment, as are operating systems, 4GL tools themselves (debatable), communications, hardware drivers and generally non database applications. As the developers have access to all the API’s and are that step closer to the CPU, they generally have wider usage opportunities.
Accessibility to wider developer pool. Whilst there are probably thousands of developers for your chosen 4GL, possibly even tens of thousands. These tools simply do not have the numbers associated to mainstream development languages and IDE’s. There is an estimated 4 to 5 million developers following the evolution of Java and no doubt Microsoft can boast even more for its most popular products. That said, of course, this also means that it is also harder to find a guru within that skills ocean, not to mention, filtering out those who have spent 15 minutes in the IDE and now claim some form of exposure on their curriculum vitae.
3GL’s are quicker to react to emerging markets and development trends. Generally the suppliers of these 3GL tools are inventing the future. They don’t often agree with each other but they certainly have the advantage over the 4GL creator. These guys have to wait and see what technology actually matures beyond the marketing hype and into mainstream best practice before committing to provide code generation for that area.
Flexibility. Languages at 3GL level, depending on the targeted platform, have virtually no restrictions with the type of application that can be written and how they are written. This means that applications where speed of performance is the critical measurement of success then it is most likely that a 4GL will fall short of the handwritten targeted code.
The Pro’s of a 4GL
Business rules focused development. Once you have learnt the code generators quirks you are in a situation where you mainly tackle your development from the business domain and you allow the code generator to handle the technical implementation. With this comes a significant reduction in the amount of time required to build an application. Many will say that there are standards and frameworks that help with 3GL development. This is actually quite true, but, also be aware that the code generator vendor will be skilled with the major best practices and will write more consistent code. Some may argue that the code is not as neat as code written by a good developer and in the regard, I quite agree. I will say that the underlying code will be written in the same way and style, therefore, after a while all the developers will become conversant in how the code is generated, that is, if they want or need to understand. (See Below)
Complexity avoidance. A 4GL will protect the majority of the developers using the tools from the underlying complexities of the generated language. When you couple this with the ability to influence how the code is generated using patterns, have the ability to take the design model from the 4GL and transform that into other language code, your business logic can truly be ported from platform to platform as trends become reality and your technical needs change.
Impact Analysis. For me this is one of the key features of using a 4GL tool. Generally these tools use a database to store design and program artefacts that are then transformed in the language code. Every reference for every field, File/Table, Access Path/Index/View, Function/Object/Program is stored in the repository and a developer can track each and every item through to where and how they are used. This is a powerful feature that cannot be overlooked versus manual reviewing of language source files.
Trusting the generator. When I train people to use CA 2E or CA Plex the defining moment for gauging the developers progress and understanding is the day that they learn to trust the generator. As with any tool, a badly constructed function in 2E, for example, can create badly generated and non compilable code. Once the developer realises that it is generally their fault if a generation of code fails they’re ready to move forward. If have seen far to many 3GL programmers migrate to the 4GL paradigm only to get bogged down into the details of the code produced, yet they will trust the compiler without hesitation. With the ability to change a shared function or the domain of a field and then apply detailed automated impact analysis to identify all affected programs, press a button to regenerate and compile all programs and database files affected is a very powerful feature.
The Con’s of a 3GL
Slower, more expensive development. The very nature and size of modern 3GL languages and their flexibility is also their Achilles Heel as there are so many ways to resolve a programming issue with literally thousands of opinions and many directions. In a nutshell for certain types of applications, particularly those that involve the extensive usage of a database, the ROI for using a 3GL versus a 4GL is very poor indeed. To contra some of the cost debate, 4GL tools are generally more expensive to purchase. The most expensive item in any development team is the human, even if it has been outsourced to an emerging development powerhouse.
You will spend more time debugging the application. A very good ex-colleague of mine once said “If the art of debugging is the removal of bugs from programs, then programming must be the art of putting them there in the first place.” Because we are relying on the developer to code all aspects of the application it is likely to cause some issues along the way. It is generally the developer’s prerogative to deal with memory leaks and usage in languages like Java or C++ but with a 4GL it would be the code generators responsibility.
Complexity. Once again due to the size of the languages and their strong reach it is unlikely that you will find developers that know all the aspects required to complete an application. Your staffing needs are generally much higher and the learning curve for the 3GL would be very significant indeed. This means that the developers must understand many technical as well as business problems.
The Con’s of a 4GL
Vendor lock in. Depending on the vendor this can be quite a significant issue. If the vendors are too slow to react to emerging technologies you will find yourself with a heterogeneous development environment and you will lose many of the advantages referred to above with regard to complexity protection and highly detailed impact analysis. Worse still, your vendor may well decide to stop production of the 4GL or chose other directions as the options with technology deployment balloon. These tools are often criticised as proprietary.
Flexibility. There will be limitations with the scope of applications that can be created by a single 4GL. There are of course others that target different platforms and purposes. Their flexibility is often measured in the lowest common denominator for which they have to support/generate code for. For example a generator that generates code for three different platforms may have to limit what can be done in one language due to limitations in another. For example different languages may have differing maximum field lengths meaning that for generic code construction in the 4GL platform x and y can only size fields to the limits of platform z.
Source Code. Many 3GL developers will argue that the code is not user friendly, bloated and often too generic in comparison to hand-written code. This can be true of some code generators and is certainly something that needs to be considered when choosing an approach for your development.
All of the above are by no sense of the imagine a definite list. Given time, I believe that I could have produced a list of 20+ Pro’s and Con’s for each approach.
Part III will discuss trends, fads and conclude the 3GL and 4GL debate with my own personal viewpoint.
Thanks for reading.
Lee.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
The Great 3GL v 4GL debate - Part I
Ever since development languages were invented we have sought ways of making the development of software easier. We have attempted to do this by abstracting the level at which the developer is employed to create code and created languages and tools which are more 'natural English' in terms of human interaction. However, on the other hand we have also added to this extra levels of complexity with changing hardware, communications protocols, multi-tier server deployment, runtimes, middleware, messaging technology and language politics and I haven’t even bothered to discuss the internet.
Regarding language politics, read anywhere on the internet about the great .NET or J2EE debate or perhaps commercial languages versus open source and you will quickly realise that there is significant inroads to be made with IT vendors around the world. You will see an IT community that is split pretty much down the middle, although if you want my humble opinion as it currently stands, I believe that we will once again see a shift towards packaged and guaranteed software over that of open source and Microsoft will eventually win the development language tools war.
This three part article aims to discuss the evolution (not revolution) of software development languages with particular focus on third and fourth generation languages, a debate on the pro’s and con’s of these approaches and then conclude with a few comments regarding some of the repeating fads as I see it today.
It wasn’t that long ago that the typical software developer would have been aged between 35 and 60, male, probably balding (So that’s me covered), university educated and employed within those same hallowed institutional walls since passing his exams, quite ironically with his non IT related degree. He would have been wearing white coats in the office, have bottle bottomed glasses, a pocket full of pens and answered to the name of geek or dork.
Well this is how Hollywood and the urban stereotype would have it.
A bit harsh if you ask me but to be fair, they would have been fascinated by punch cards, saw value in paper tape with holes in it and probably would have missed any fads of the times with regard to musical revolution. There certainly would have been very few ordinary people and the numbers of women specialising in this field, countable on the one hand.
Now, time has moved on, as has technology and you now can’t tell an IT guy apart from your ordinary office worker. It actually amazes me that although we are making the art of software development easier, the extra layers of complexity should in theory have amounted to a increase in the numbers of geeky looking guys, so much so that if lined up ten abreast a communist regime would have been proud to show off their IT military might with these millions marching in city squares across the world. But this hasn’t happened, IT in general is now a mainstream activity and the working environments are certainly more aligned to that of a typical office environment. With this mass adoption of IT skills in the work place I also believe that IT guys are now considered a corporate commodity, where as 15 years ago the pay would have been relatively higher, how times are changing.
So we have worked hard to improve the scope and productivity of the average software developer. We have migrated from the punch card era to having keyboards, mice, laser pens and voice recognition input devices. We have languages that have evolved to make them more readable and understood by a human. The days of everyone programming in assembler or other low-level machine/processor level code began to change with the introduction of the 3GL languages of the day. COBOL, Fortran, RPG and Basic would be good examples here. I am sure that at that time some people would have embraced the new paradigm as much as developers have embraced Java or are now embracing Flex/Actionscript, Ruby on rails or C# as the perfect way forward. There would also have been the doubters and I guess the split would have been no different to many of the impasses that we see reported online and in periodicals every.
Still, software engineering took time.
We are improving and continue to improve 3GL languages to this very day. We now have a whole hard drive full of productivity features embedded within our integrated development environments (IDE). Features like wizards, auto code completion, and syntax auto-correction were non-existent back then, let alone globally accepted standards and minimum requirements.
Regarding language politics, read anywhere on the internet about the great .NET or J2EE debate or perhaps commercial languages versus open source and you will quickly realise that there is significant inroads to be made with IT vendors around the world. You will see an IT community that is split pretty much down the middle, although if you want my humble opinion as it currently stands, I believe that we will once again see a shift towards packaged and guaranteed software over that of open source and Microsoft will eventually win the development language tools war.
This three part article aims to discuss the evolution (not revolution) of software development languages with particular focus on third and fourth generation languages, a debate on the pro’s and con’s of these approaches and then conclude with a few comments regarding some of the repeating fads as I see it today.
It wasn’t that long ago that the typical software developer would have been aged between 35 and 60, male, probably balding (So that’s me covered), university educated and employed within those same hallowed institutional walls since passing his exams, quite ironically with his non IT related degree. He would have been wearing white coats in the office, have bottle bottomed glasses, a pocket full of pens and answered to the name of geek or dork.
Well this is how Hollywood and the urban stereotype would have it.
A bit harsh if you ask me but to be fair, they would have been fascinated by punch cards, saw value in paper tape with holes in it and probably would have missed any fads of the times with regard to musical revolution. There certainly would have been very few ordinary people and the numbers of women specialising in this field, countable on the one hand.
Now, time has moved on, as has technology and you now can’t tell an IT guy apart from your ordinary office worker. It actually amazes me that although we are making the art of software development easier, the extra layers of complexity should in theory have amounted to a increase in the numbers of geeky looking guys, so much so that if lined up ten abreast a communist regime would have been proud to show off their IT military might with these millions marching in city squares across the world. But this hasn’t happened, IT in general is now a mainstream activity and the working environments are certainly more aligned to that of a typical office environment. With this mass adoption of IT skills in the work place I also believe that IT guys are now considered a corporate commodity, where as 15 years ago the pay would have been relatively higher, how times are changing.
So we have worked hard to improve the scope and productivity of the average software developer. We have migrated from the punch card era to having keyboards, mice, laser pens and voice recognition input devices. We have languages that have evolved to make them more readable and understood by a human. The days of everyone programming in assembler or other low-level machine/processor level code began to change with the introduction of the 3GL languages of the day. COBOL, Fortran, RPG and Basic would be good examples here. I am sure that at that time some people would have embraced the new paradigm as much as developers have embraced Java or are now embracing Flex/Actionscript, Ruby on rails or C# as the perfect way forward. There would also have been the doubters and I guess the split would have been no different to many of the impasses that we see reported online and in periodicals every.
Still, software engineering took time.
We are improving and continue to improve 3GL languages to this very day. We now have a whole hard drive full of productivity features embedded within our integrated development environments (IDE). Features like wizards, auto code completion, and syntax auto-correction were non-existent back then, let alone globally accepted standards and minimum requirements.
I would say that any developer working 20 years ago would never have thought that freeware/open source (delete as appropriate) products like Openoffice or Eclipse would be a reality. They could have conceived that software was given away as a loss leader for professional services, but, a massive corporation like IBM giving away a product that it spent and to this day still spends millions of dollars on would have been considered insane. But this is the state of play today.
So when many thought that we had gone as far as we could with the evolution of the 3GL language we once again raised the bar with the next great technology advancement. This time we evolved to 4GL languages. These are otherwise known as code generators, CASE (Computer Aided System Engineering) tools or ARAD (Architected Rapid Application Development). This was hailed as the end of the expensive IT developer, the marketing expressed that the typical end user could now get involved in the development of the IT systems and return the ownership and power of your systems back to the business, and more importantly drive it out of the hands of that lowly IT department.
The same IT department that through these times was still considered a cost overhead rather than a business opportunity enabler. Many of you may remember the days when the IT function reported to the financial controller. I believe that most IT people are artists who can’t draw and we use the creative parts of our brain to build beautiful code and systems. To think that you’d stifle (some may still continue to do) this creativity with the frigidity of accountant mentality still frightens me. Imagine the marketing or sales director reporting to that same accountant? Actually I can, ouch!!!!!!!
With the marketing hype, 3GL project overruns and increasingly tight deliverables the 4GL era was born and in my view this has created some of the more interesting debates in IT circles. The simple reason being that I would anticipate that for each platform/system available there would be numerous languages that are either compatible (Java and the JVM) or targeted (Compiled) that are considered the language of choice, each with their own hardcore developer following. There will also, more than likely, be a 4GL that targets that platform and I bet my left one that a maximum of 10% of the users of the platform use a 4GL over that of the 3GL.
Are these 10% the visionaries?
Well I guess that depends on the tools of choice, but no one denounces the 10% of personal computer users that use the Apple Mac and all its gizmos.
You also have to consider that many of these 4GL languages evolved during a time of single platform computing. i.e. There would be a 4GL that would target the complete application development cycle. The tools were capable of constructing everything from the database, screen and reports though to catering for the applications menus. I have had experience developing in both 3GL and 4GL languages and I believe that I am well placed to comment accurately about both approaches. So as IT has evolved so have many of these 4GL tools.
The question is do you choose a 3GL or a 4GL?
This is still a fiercely debated argument online or at technology conferences just as much as the debate around the merits of client/server technology versus thin client or betamax v VHS (lol). With the emergence of more and more technologies and web 2.0 we are again beginning to witness the thin/rich client gloves come off. Which for me is quite ironic as web thin client was the reason for killing off the high deployment cost of client/server systems which itself was created to offset performance issues of software systems and distribute the processing load.
That said, cost is now measured in bandwidth and reach rather than hardware and employees required to support the system.
I personally believe that these architecture choices should be down to the type of application you’re creating and its accessibility and user requirements. Also, this is the same thinking behind why you would choose a given development tool and at which level of abstraction you wish to develop the application. Another interesting topic involved with the 3GL v 4GL debate is that many of these tools are capable of producing code for multiple platforms i.e. IBM Power System (RPG), Windows (C of one variant or another) as well as Java which is capable of being deployed on multiple platforms.
Java claims a write it once, deploy it many times approach. I would say that it should be rephrased as write it once and the tune it for each platform, JVM or application server of your choice. Now I make no bones that I am an advocate of the 4GL (especially CA Plex or CA 2e) over the 3GL for the applications that I have written over the years. Most 4GLs cater for the RDBMS systems and are best suited for these types of environments i.e. banking systems etc. Other 4GLs or tools for writing computer games are in existence and once again these are designed to protect the developer from the underlying complexities of the code. With these engines you do not need to understand the ins and outs of DirectX or DirectDraw API’s or the language that is generated. But your decision to use one of these tools must be twofold.
1. It must be appropriate for the type of application you are creating.
2. Once you have chosen the 4GL you must stick to it and use it properly.
There are many tools out there that claim that they can generate code into multiple languages and these tools in my opinion are great for ISV’s that need to have an offering across multiple platforms to negate the hard sell of one technology over another. After all, shouldn’t your marketing and sales teams be selling the values and merits of your software’s function and feature set rather than justifying your company’s technology decisions
Part II will discuss the many pro’s and con’s of the 3GL and 4GL languages and tools.
So when many thought that we had gone as far as we could with the evolution of the 3GL language we once again raised the bar with the next great technology advancement. This time we evolved to 4GL languages. These are otherwise known as code generators, CASE (Computer Aided System Engineering) tools or ARAD (Architected Rapid Application Development). This was hailed as the end of the expensive IT developer, the marketing expressed that the typical end user could now get involved in the development of the IT systems and return the ownership and power of your systems back to the business, and more importantly drive it out of the hands of that lowly IT department.
The same IT department that through these times was still considered a cost overhead rather than a business opportunity enabler. Many of you may remember the days when the IT function reported to the financial controller. I believe that most IT people are artists who can’t draw and we use the creative parts of our brain to build beautiful code and systems. To think that you’d stifle (some may still continue to do) this creativity with the frigidity of accountant mentality still frightens me. Imagine the marketing or sales director reporting to that same accountant? Actually I can, ouch!!!!!!!
With the marketing hype, 3GL project overruns and increasingly tight deliverables the 4GL era was born and in my view this has created some of the more interesting debates in IT circles. The simple reason being that I would anticipate that for each platform/system available there would be numerous languages that are either compatible (Java and the JVM) or targeted (Compiled) that are considered the language of choice, each with their own hardcore developer following. There will also, more than likely, be a 4GL that targets that platform and I bet my left one that a maximum of 10% of the users of the platform use a 4GL over that of the 3GL.
Are these 10% the visionaries?
Well I guess that depends on the tools of choice, but no one denounces the 10% of personal computer users that use the Apple Mac and all its gizmos.
You also have to consider that many of these 4GL languages evolved during a time of single platform computing. i.e. There would be a 4GL that would target the complete application development cycle. The tools were capable of constructing everything from the database, screen and reports though to catering for the applications menus. I have had experience developing in both 3GL and 4GL languages and I believe that I am well placed to comment accurately about both approaches. So as IT has evolved so have many of these 4GL tools.
The question is do you choose a 3GL or a 4GL?
This is still a fiercely debated argument online or at technology conferences just as much as the debate around the merits of client/server technology versus thin client or betamax v VHS (lol). With the emergence of more and more technologies and web 2.0 we are again beginning to witness the thin/rich client gloves come off. Which for me is quite ironic as web thin client was the reason for killing off the high deployment cost of client/server systems which itself was created to offset performance issues of software systems and distribute the processing load.
That said, cost is now measured in bandwidth and reach rather than hardware and employees required to support the system.
I personally believe that these architecture choices should be down to the type of application you’re creating and its accessibility and user requirements. Also, this is the same thinking behind why you would choose a given development tool and at which level of abstraction you wish to develop the application. Another interesting topic involved with the 3GL v 4GL debate is that many of these tools are capable of producing code for multiple platforms i.e. IBM Power System (RPG), Windows (C of one variant or another) as well as Java which is capable of being deployed on multiple platforms.
Java claims a write it once, deploy it many times approach. I would say that it should be rephrased as write it once and the tune it for each platform, JVM or application server of your choice. Now I make no bones that I am an advocate of the 4GL (especially CA Plex or CA 2e) over the 3GL for the applications that I have written over the years. Most 4GLs cater for the RDBMS systems and are best suited for these types of environments i.e. banking systems etc. Other 4GLs or tools for writing computer games are in existence and once again these are designed to protect the developer from the underlying complexities of the code. With these engines you do not need to understand the ins and outs of DirectX or DirectDraw API’s or the language that is generated. But your decision to use one of these tools must be twofold.
1. It must be appropriate for the type of application you are creating.
2. Once you have chosen the 4GL you must stick to it and use it properly.
There are many tools out there that claim that they can generate code into multiple languages and these tools in my opinion are great for ISV’s that need to have an offering across multiple platforms to negate the hard sell of one technology over another. After all, shouldn’t your marketing and sales teams be selling the values and merits of your software’s function and feature set rather than justifying your company’s technology decisions
Part II will discuss the many pro’s and con’s of the 3GL and 4GL languages and tools.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
The new millenium Bug?
There are only 17576 combinations that can be considered when allocating a TLA (Three Letter Acronym) for airport codes. Part of the challenge is that the code should also be meaningful and identifiable, for instance, everyone knows that London Heathrow is LHR and that Berlin in Germany is BER.
If you don't believe me take a look at this site http://www.world-airport-codes.com/.
After a while some of the codes appear confusing. Hwanga in Zimbabwe has the seemingly obvious code of WKI. I assume this is pronounced Wiki.
This may be of interest to some of the IT geeks reading this, assuming of course that the introduction of Google’s Knol has/will obliterated the Wiki concept. I can never work out why open source stuff like this "Wiki" is so damn difficult to maintain. I guarantee that Google or Microsoft will make this easy for Joe Bloggs general public to use. I can personally hear the death knell for Wiki already, largely IMHO its own fault for keeping it geeky and for the myriad of different syntax styles that are available.
Anyhow, back to airports. With over 9000 airports registered in the database to-date and our insatiable appetite to travel around the world, it is likely that more and more airports are going to be built, each requiring yet another unique meaningful code.
Presently, these codes do not include numeric characters so the basic math tells me that there are 26x26x26=17576 combinations available. This is stated with the assumption that unlike car license plates, we do use every letter available in the alphabet.
So what is going to happen come the day when we have used up all these codes. We could begin to use numeric characters, however, the numbers 0,1,2,3,5 and 7 are unavailable due to their similarities with the O, I ,Z,M (sideways), S and L. Also, unless we have taken a big step into the future, a code like KN9 really sounds like a it should remain in a novel by Arthur C Clarke rather than a domestic airport in deepest Taiwan.
That said, there is more than one way to skin this cat.
We could be tempted to extend the size of the code from say 3 characters to 4, or perhaps more. However, this will require a huge amount of effort to synchronise all the airline ticketing systems around the world, not to mention:-
If you don't believe me take a look at this site http://www.world-airport-codes.com/.
After a while some of the codes appear confusing. Hwanga in Zimbabwe has the seemingly obvious code of WKI. I assume this is pronounced Wiki.
This may be of interest to some of the IT geeks reading this, assuming of course that the introduction of Google’s Knol has/will obliterated the Wiki concept. I can never work out why open source stuff like this "Wiki" is so damn difficult to maintain. I guarantee that Google or Microsoft will make this easy for Joe Bloggs general public to use. I can personally hear the death knell for Wiki already, largely IMHO its own fault for keeping it geeky and for the myriad of different syntax styles that are available.
Anyhow, back to airports. With over 9000 airports registered in the database to-date and our insatiable appetite to travel around the world, it is likely that more and more airports are going to be built, each requiring yet another unique meaningful code.
Presently, these codes do not include numeric characters so the basic math tells me that there are 26x26x26=17576 combinations available. This is stated with the assumption that unlike car license plates, we do use every letter available in the alphabet.
So what is going to happen come the day when we have used up all these codes. We could begin to use numeric characters, however, the numbers 0,1,2,3,5 and 7 are unavailable due to their similarities with the O, I ,Z,M (sideways), S and L. Also, unless we have taken a big step into the future, a code like KN9 really sounds like a it should remain in a novel by Arthur C Clarke rather than a domestic airport in deepest Taiwan.
That said, there is more than one way to skin this cat.
We could be tempted to extend the size of the code from say 3 characters to 4, or perhaps more. However, this will require a huge amount of effort to synchronise all the airline ticketing systems around the world, not to mention:-
- Online and published guides.
- Signage (i.e. Welcome to LAX).
- All those travel agents whom for years had remembered these codes.
- All those flight anoraks who have travelled to every airport known to humankind.
- The humble fan website and all those pub quiz questions that have been written and are now negated.
All this hassel because someone decided to save a byte or two when naming the airports in order to save, at the time, valuable disk space. The irony being that this is the same disk space that the likes of Google and Yahoo are giving you gigabytes of just to sign up for an online email account.
It doesn't stop there though, what about the issued tickets that are already in the public domain. The transition period for change over would be huge (up to a year). So now we have to include all those check-in staff and the baggage handlers who now have to remember two codes for every airport into the debate.
I would suggest that the majority of those 9,000 airports have been created in the last 50 years. I find it quite daunting that we might experience the aviation equivalent of the millennium bug. This may not be that far off and once the developing nations reach full steam ahead with their expontential economic growth, you may well find yourself employed in the future to sort out the code written by those legacy developers.
Those same developers who didn't have the foresight to cater for tomorrow’s usage.
When we think about it, this has happened before. It was 20 years or so ago when it was concluded that 640kb of RAM was more than enough for any computing requirements in the home PC.
And those guys from the 70's that designed these airline systems have a lot to answer for. Not only did they earn good money back then with job security (outsourcing wasn't invented or trendy then). They now get rewarded for coming back in and fixing up their issues many years later.
So get travelling now. There might be some downtime in this industry and remember, someone has to pay for all this development. I pray to god (actually I don't as I am athiest) that you are using a 4GL like 2e or Plex to maintain this code. If you are using a 3GL you might have quite a lot of impact analysis to perform first.
Remember, you need to be extra cautious with your design and field domain management and regardless of what people tell you they want, look into the future and get it right first time.
Watch this space. You heard it here first.
It doesn't stop there though, what about the issued tickets that are already in the public domain. The transition period for change over would be huge (up to a year). So now we have to include all those check-in staff and the baggage handlers who now have to remember two codes for every airport into the debate.
I would suggest that the majority of those 9,000 airports have been created in the last 50 years. I find it quite daunting that we might experience the aviation equivalent of the millennium bug. This may not be that far off and once the developing nations reach full steam ahead with their expontential economic growth, you may well find yourself employed in the future to sort out the code written by those legacy developers.
Those same developers who didn't have the foresight to cater for tomorrow’s usage.
When we think about it, this has happened before. It was 20 years or so ago when it was concluded that 640kb of RAM was more than enough for any computing requirements in the home PC.
And those guys from the 70's that designed these airline systems have a lot to answer for. Not only did they earn good money back then with job security (outsourcing wasn't invented or trendy then). They now get rewarded for coming back in and fixing up their issues many years later.
So get travelling now. There might be some downtime in this industry and remember, someone has to pay for all this development. I pray to god (actually I don't as I am athiest) that you are using a 4GL like 2e or Plex to maintain this code. If you are using a 3GL you might have quite a lot of impact analysis to perform first.
Remember, you need to be extra cautious with your design and field domain management and regardless of what people tell you they want, look into the future and get it right first time.
Watch this space. You heard it here first.
Thanks for reading.
Lee.
Lee.
Monday, March 17, 2008
What do you do for a living?
This has to be one of the most common questions asked of anyone in life. Apart from, How are you?, Can I buy you a drink? or cringingly, Do you come here often?. Well, this isn't an article about chat up lines or dating gotchas. I am long past all of that.
However, many people can simply reply “I am a plumber” or “Nah, I’m a sparky geezer!” (Electrician), or perhaps they might say "I have my own business selling cars" or "I work for a bank doing banking stuff". The point here is that no matter what they do, their audience will immediately be able to understand what they do and if they need their help or services, they can simply ask.
For the average IT geek, this is always a tricky and preferably avoidable question. We tend to shy away from disclosing our job because we are concerned about the impact of this little snippet of knowledge in the heads of a non IT savvy person.
There is a common phrase in IT that goes something like, 'A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing'. Actually, I guess this is true, in general. DIY being a good example.
As IT professionals we tend to try and answer this question ambiguously.
Mainly because we think that what we do is so very specialist and complicated, we also make allowances for the questioner as we believe that they will switch off. We have a primeval fear that we will not be able to complete communicating the fluffy, pinky greeny codey stuff, about why we love our job.
On this note, I do appreciate that in all professions there are general conversations and then there are the technical jargon and insider acronym riddled low level conversations.
As IT professionals we have invented more TLA's (Three Letter Acronyms) than any other profession, possibly with the exception of airport abbreviation naming committees.
Anyhow, a typical answer would be “Urrrrm, Computers”.
“Arghh, Right!!!” comes the reply, quickly followed by “Can you take a look at my computer?”.
And this is it, the single biggest fear of an IT professional. Your job might be that of a patterns and framework designer for J2EE or you may be a Mainframe performance specialist, but rest assured the simple mention that you work with “Computers” means that you are now their personal technical support helpdesk, for life........
Now, by contrast, our plumber and electrician are both in the home building or renovation trades, but, you never hear me asking them if they can do some plasterboard stopping, tile my roof or fit double glazing.
I guess that over time the general levels of understanding of the different roles within IT will improve. However, until this day has arrived I have learnt the hard way to always reply in a precise and exact manner.
"I specialise in software application modernisation, building and shaping high productivity development teams to meet the demands of developing enterprise business applications. I also provide bespoke consulting and training services and expertise in utilising multi-platform 4GL code generation tools.”
Now, for all but the most technical people out there, I tend to get that ‘lights out’ glare about halfway through that sentence, but, on the plus side, I also no longer get those requests for on the spot computer repairs.
Thanks for reading.
Lee.
However, many people can simply reply “I am a plumber” or “Nah, I’m a sparky geezer!” (Electrician), or perhaps they might say "I have my own business selling cars" or "I work for a bank doing banking stuff". The point here is that no matter what they do, their audience will immediately be able to understand what they do and if they need their help or services, they can simply ask.
For the average IT geek, this is always a tricky and preferably avoidable question. We tend to shy away from disclosing our job because we are concerned about the impact of this little snippet of knowledge in the heads of a non IT savvy person.
There is a common phrase in IT that goes something like, 'A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing'. Actually, I guess this is true, in general. DIY being a good example.
As IT professionals we tend to try and answer this question ambiguously.
Mainly because we think that what we do is so very specialist and complicated, we also make allowances for the questioner as we believe that they will switch off. We have a primeval fear that we will not be able to complete communicating the fluffy, pinky greeny codey stuff, about why we love our job.
On this note, I do appreciate that in all professions there are general conversations and then there are the technical jargon and insider acronym riddled low level conversations.
As IT professionals we have invented more TLA's (Three Letter Acronyms) than any other profession, possibly with the exception of airport abbreviation naming committees.
Anyhow, a typical answer would be “Urrrrm, Computers”.
“Arghh, Right!!!” comes the reply, quickly followed by “Can you take a look at my computer?”.
And this is it, the single biggest fear of an IT professional. Your job might be that of a patterns and framework designer for J2EE or you may be a Mainframe performance specialist, but rest assured the simple mention that you work with “Computers” means that you are now their personal technical support helpdesk, for life........
Now, by contrast, our plumber and electrician are both in the home building or renovation trades, but, you never hear me asking them if they can do some plasterboard stopping, tile my roof or fit double glazing.
I guess that over time the general levels of understanding of the different roles within IT will improve. However, until this day has arrived I have learnt the hard way to always reply in a precise and exact manner.
"I specialise in software application modernisation, building and shaping high productivity development teams to meet the demands of developing enterprise business applications. I also provide bespoke consulting and training services and expertise in utilising multi-platform 4GL code generation tools.”
Now, for all but the most technical people out there, I tend to get that ‘lights out’ glare about halfway through that sentence, but, on the plus side, I also no longer get those requests for on the spot computer repairs.
Thanks for reading.
Lee.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)