An interesting question we keep getting asked is how do I get Rational Developer for System i or Rational Developer for System i SOA. And can I even get it, if we do not use V610 of OS400? Hopefully I can answer a few of those questions here, and it can mean you will get access to all the new functionality to make your life easier.
Q) We are not on V610 but wants RDi, can we use it? That customer may also consider RDi SOA, can they use it and if so back to what release?
A) RDi or RDi SOA can be used to create programs to be deployed to V5R3, V5R4, and V6R1. If you do not want to order V6R1 yet, then you order RDi or RDi SOA through Passport Advantage.
Q) We have been doing only green screen development, but now we are going to V610. How many licences of ADTS do we get if they have say a P10 machine? Do we then get 40% off each one of those upgraded with the current special offer, and what discount would they get if they said lets go all the way to RBD SOA?
A) The table below shows the Entitlement for customers upgrading to V6R1. For ADTS on a P10, they will be entitled to 15 users for each feature; ILE Compilers, Heritage Compilers, and ADTS, with the change to user based licensing. You can then chose if you want to take any of those licences across to RDi, and get the current 40% discount.
There is no discount or trade-up for ADTS to RDi SOA at this time, only for ADTS to RDi, and only if ordered through the eConfigurator, so it cannot be ordered under passport advantage.
We recently decided it would be useful to develop a RAD plug-in that would allow developers to log time against tasks more simply. I'm not going to detail all the steps involved, or indeed provide much information regarding the actual plug-in we developed, but I thought it would be useful to note down some of the issues I hit, and thoughts I had along the way.
RAD6 vs RAD7
We have some developers using RAD6 and others using RAD7 (and some other staff that use neither of these), and the initial decision was to develop the plug-in for RAD7. This was the environment that I was predominantly using and the thought was that most staff would eventually upgrade.
In hindsight this might not have been a great decision. After getting the RAD7 version working we needed to try to get all staff using the new system (the old timesheet system had been finished with), and the developers writing Websphere Commerce applications were finding it impossible to upgrade RAD for the time being. Hence we had to back port the existing plug-in to RAD6.
Thinking that this would be a relatively trivial task I started by changing my target environment and seeing what, if anything, in the existing code would break.
It looked as though there were only a couple of things - code relying on the web browser framework and some of the listeners. I simply created a couple of new plug-in projects and encapsulated the platform specific logic into these, then when the feature was built I could reference the correct one to build the plug-in.
Testing this failed immediately with an error stating that execution environment and runtime environment did not match. This caused me quite a bit of grief... I tried changing the execution environment stipulation in the plugin.xml down from Java5 - to Java1.4 - to Java1.3, still the same error. Having eliminated this as the cause of the error I tried to find out exactly what version of java RAD6 was using. It turns out that a JRE is bundled into RAD and this is not a standard JRE, but is a flavour of Java 1.4. Immediately this caused me another problem as I had used Java5 in my RAD7 plugin and had also utilised some of the benfits of this such as generics and enums. After changing all the code down to match the JRE stipulation, testing the plug-in failed yet again! This time it turned out that the structure of the plugin was causing a problem and RAD6 was not correctly reading the MANIFEST file. The only solution I could find to this was to remove the MANIFEST file and code the equivalent configuration into the plugin.xml.
End result is that we now have a completely separate set of plug-in projects to support the RAD6 version. So much for code reuse!
Plug-in activator
The structure of the plug-in was such that I wanted the UI and business object model to be separated from the back-end time reporting repository and connectors to this. The idea being that although we would initially be using Bugzilla as the repository if we found something better, then as long as I could write a new connector, to retrieve and update the information, then the rest of the plug-in would not need to be touched.
In order to do this I separated the task repository connection into a separate plug-in and then planned to get it to push an instance of the repository into the main business object model activator at startup of the bundle. The idea being that the main business object model activator only needed to know about an interface to the repository, and the actual implementation would be sourced at runtime. However, this has a slight issue - the repository plug-in would only be activated when one of it's classes was loaded, and none of it's classes would be loaded because there was no direct reference.
I tried to force the startup process of the activator from one of the other plug-ins, but this simply caused more issues, and in the end had to simply reference the bugzilla repository class direct ly.
This is not an ideal solution, but seeing as the number of times this is likely to occur is pretty small I decided it wouldn't be too big a problem. Thinking about it again now I wonder if there is a way of forcing the load of the plug-in when RAD is started? If anyone knows then I would definitely be interested!
Update site and feature
I thought this was worth a mention because this has caused some confusion for me.
I've had several occasions where, after appearing to get the plug-in working, I've tried to deploy to a test environment via the update site only to find that it still doesn't work properly. Some of these issues have been related to JRE/environment settings etc as detailed above, but some have come from the latest code not building correctly - or the update not picking up the latest code. This seems to have been much more of an issue for the RAD6 plug-in, but it seems that the best way around any issues has been to always increase the version number when building and deploying to the update site. Even if this is still within testing cycles.
Making the plug-in available to a wider audience
As well as the developers we also have a number of project managers/admin staff that require access to the plug-in. I've thought of quite a few ways of doing this - create an RCP, create and RAP... And then there's the simple approach which we are using as a short term alternative.
I've installed a vanilla version of Eclipse 3.2.2 (this is the base version of Eclipse that RAD7 is built on) on the relevant machines, and installed my RAD7 version of the plug-in onto this - there's no dependency on any RAD libraries. Simple!
At some point I will go back to the RCP/RAP alternatives as this should give a cleaner solution - but for now everyone can work happily
I have been spending quite a bit of time recently attempting to get QuickrJ2EE, or by its longer name Quickr Services for WebSphere Portal up and running. It has proved an interesting experience, not least of all because I am trying to plug it into a Portal 6.1 Express environment. One of the first things we found, is that when we tried to do an express install from the images we downloaded, it failed with an authority error. A nice Java dump was created, and it was not very clear what you needed.
After opening a PMR what we found is that you need optional image 8, which says it is the Edge Components. For those not aware edge is the load balancing software that can provide the load balancing support in front of your webservers. So why would you need to have the edge image there, when you are doing a standard express server install? If you look at the technote unless it has been updated it does not show you need image 8, but in reality don't leave home without it.
Thanks Bleddyn
If you have Rational Business Developer SOA and Rational Developer for System i and HATS installed, it will not update. There is a known issue, which we have been waiting to be fixed and although there are now new updates it is still there. This technote provides the details on how to get around this.
Update 3rd August
This details an iFix on how to get around the issue.
http://www-949.ibm.com/software/rational/cafe/thread/1098?tstart=0
If you have not been there yet get along to the EGL cafe http://www-949.ibm.com/software/rational/cafe/index.jspa where you can see Andy is the top posting member. He seems to be fighting to retain his title but is right there at the top at the moment. If you look on the right hand side it shows the leading members and Andy is at the top, being pushed hard by Joe Pluta though.
They are putting some good things onto the site now, check out the video on the front page from the rational conference. Can you spot Andy in the crowd?
Given the interest in the new tools from Rational for developing your IBM i solutions. Combined with the lack of easy to understand information, we have decided to launch a half day demo on the tools. This can take you through the following aspects and can either be done against your system or here in our offices. It aims to provide a better understanding of why moving to IBM Rational Developer for System i (RDi) or to IBM Rational Business Developer for SOA Construction (RBD for SOA), can help you really move forward in your application development. Add in the power of using Host Access Transformation Server (HATS), to not only bring your screens up to date but also quickly produce web services from your application, and its a powerful combination of tools The areas covered are below, if you want to look at other aspects then please contact us at info@morpheus.co.uk or use the same address to book the demo.
- RDi
- Connect to the system using RDi.
- Browse objects on system showing what you now have access to.
- Set up filters for libraries and objects to give a user-specific view.
- Use typical OS/400 commands from the workbench
- Work with libraries and objects from workbench Work with jobs from workbench.
- Set up "template" or "prompted" commands that can be run from workbench Set up double-click commands that can be run from workbench.
- Show examples of things like Save Files being transferred and then restored, to show how integrated the environment is.
- Browse code and resources e.g. viewing content of data files, working with RPG source code.
- Work through demo to show EGL calling a sample RPG program and displaying results in a web page.
- Debugging RPG code, when called from EGL.
- Database access and build a series of screens which provide access into and data on the system.
- Web services integration
- Walk through how to create a HATS web service or a HATS flow that can then be integrated into EGL.
- Show the new Visual Macro Editor (VME) functionality with HATS.
Our new website was finally unveiled on Friday the 13th, yes the 13th of June! It's taken quite a long time to complete, partly because during that time I've had to work on other projects, and partly because the content has had a complete overhaul. If you're bored and want to kill 10 minutes, here are my thoughts, reasonings and general ramblings about the redesign.
Design
I've tried to keep the design reasonably simple, but giving it fresh, modern edge. The colour scheme is a variation of the old one - keeping the red, but changing the black to a more subtle grey, along with accents of turquoise to highlight certain areas.
24-bit pngs with alpha transparency have been used to give a layered effect within certain areas such as the Morpheus logo and the polaroid photo style image in the grey banner. Alpha transparent pngs are not supported in anything less than IE7 (surprise, surprise), so I've used a script called IEPNGFix which makes use of an IE only filter, meaning PNGs are correctly rendered with full alpha transparency in both IE5.5 and IE6.
Layout
The layout is fixed width for minimum screen resolution of 1024 x 768. It may seem a bit prejudiced towards 800x600 screen users, but I think for the purpose of this website, and our target audience, we can get away with it. And if the BBC can do it... ;-)
Whereas most of the site is just a one or two column layout, the home page is 3 column. I wanted to take key information from different areas of the site and display it in a condensed but easily readable format on the home page, and I think the 3 column layout allows this.
Structure & Accessibility
HTML & CSS: The site is CSS based, using semantic mark-up to structure the content, this will allow for better search engine optimisation and of course, not forgetting accessibility and usability benefits. Both HTML and CSS have passed validation through the W3C validation service (CSS is valid CSS 2.1 and HTML is valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional).
Text Resizing: Font sizes (and certain elements where necessary) are based in ems to allow for easy text resizing across all browsers.
Unobtrusive Javascript: I've tried to make the use of any Javascript more of an enhancement to the design, and not an alternative. This means that if any users don't have Javascript enabled, then this content is still accessible to them.
Accessible Flash content using swfobject: this is a Javascript Flash Player detection and embed script. Using this method to embed Flash files overcomes issues which can't be solved by HTML markup alone. For example:
- Accessibility - it allows you to define alternative HTML content for screen readers and anyone without the Flash player.
- Overcomes problems older/IE browsers have with the
tag - Overcomes the problem of seeing the ‘click to activate content’ mechanism seen in IE.
Features and Functionality
RSS feed — this is used to display our latest blog entries on the home page. Making use of the many widgets and widely available on the web I opted for Feed2JS. This is a free web based news aggregator that allows you to display and customise a news feed of your choice on your site. It uses pre-defined HTML which can easily be customised using CSS to ensure it integrates seamlessly into your site.
Simply format your display options on the Feed2JS site, which in turn generates some script for you to paste into your site, then style as you wish!
There were a couple of close contenders: Newsgator Headlines and Feedsweep. Both very good, but Feed2JS was more customisable and I liked the fact it used an unordered list as the HTML structure for the feed.
Modal Pop-Ups — another great widget I came across was Thickbox, a Javascript modal pop-up:
"ThickBox is a webpage UI dialog widget written in JavaScript on top of the jQuery library. Its function is to show a single image, multiple images, inline content, iframed content, or content served through AJAX in a hybrid modal."
I've used this in several areas of the site:
- Case study screen shots
- Free half day mentoring workshop form. Clicking the link that says 'Contact us now to take advantage of our free half day workshop.' opens up a form in an iframe to sign up to the workshop.
The look is customisable, allowing you to change styles through the CSS, and what's more the content is still accessible to those who don't have Javascript. I think it's a great tool, which the developer has put an awful lot of time and effort into writing, and even better, he's made it available for people to use freely.
To find out more about Thickbox visit http://jquery.com/demo/thickbox/.
Forms — the enquiry forms on the contact us and consultancy and mentoring pages were written in EGL. Now, as I had nothing to do with these apart from their design - I've asked my colleague Alex, to give a bit of an explanation:
"EGL is a new language from IBM specifically designed to be able to adapt and cater for new environments as well as being fully capable of supporting all the current platforms. Its aim is to reduce the reliance on a multitude of languages, skills and processes to encapsulate all your needs into one language.
Overall it will make things simpler and easier for people to work with and administer.
Since we work with EGL to create some of our client solutions, we created the contact form using this technology to show its versatility and give an example of what can be achieved.
Obviously this is only a small scale solution but it is easily scalable and since it creates Java classes on compilation it runs with high availability and speed across all platforms."
So there you have it, our new website. It's not often you get to design a site without the constraints of some kind of framework, and to be able to use more varied and advanced CSS/design techniques which may not be practical or even desirable on the usual customer related projects. And I've enjoyed it. Next step, redesigning the blog!
Posted by: Farrah Roberts | 1 Comments | Posted: June 17th, 2008 15:51:34We have launched the new Morpheus Website today well done to the design team. It has taken quite a few iterations to get to something we think puts over what we do,and the team will be putting a post together about what has been involved in integrating the different pieces of the site. if you have any thoughts please do let us know on the blog.
Thanks Bleddyn
The initial conversation went something like...
"You're going to the Rational Software Developer Conference."
"Ooh, that sounds good."
"It's being held at Disney World in Orlando."
"Ah! Not so good, I'm not a fan of Disney; and I'll have to break the news to my daughter."
"It's in June."
"That's really not good, it's going to be hot, very hot, I don't like it when it's hot."
My objections obviously carried very little weight as I soon found myself sitting on a plane one Saturday afternoon heading for Orlando; a place so hot that a bunch of people jumped in the Space Shuttle Discovery and headed for the depths of space to escape it; I'm sure I heard laughter as Discovery shot upwards past our plane on the way into Orlando.
The deviousness of the plan came to light when I walked into the wonderfully cool air-conditioned hotel lobby and realised that with all that heat and Disney-ness outside I had no choice but to actually attend the conference sessions.
The Rational Software Developer Conference had a number of main themes. As the representative from Morpheus, my two main interests were:
" Enterprise Modernisation - helping to expose, update and utilise the vast array of business applications running on IBM z and i systems,
" IBM's Jazz technology - an open platform for collaborative software development.
IBM are making a real commitment to business developers with efforts being put into modernising the tools available for business developers. These range from the introduction of Rational based toolsets for existing development through to tools to analyse, catalogue and extend existing applications ending up with EGL for development of new business applications and entering the wonderful world of web services.
Bleddyn has previously written about the Rational Business Developer (RBD) and Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi). These are bundled into RDi for SOA and present a fully-featured bundle for development on IBM i systems. I attended a number of sessions that walked through the features of RBD and RDi and demonstrated the advantages that these tools offer over traditional green-screen based development. The main benefit is the way that the workbench can be set up to provide multiple views on the code you're writing and how it relates to other application artifacts. This is something we Java developers have been used to for a long time now and often wonder how you get by without them. The integration with the host system is very clean and you can easily work with local files or remote host files in a pretty seamless manner.
EGL was a large part of the Enterprise Modernisation track. We've been using EGL at Morpheus for just over 18 months now and seen it mature into a very powerful toolset. This is no stepping stone to Java or some other technology, it is a fully featured language all of its own. A core feature of EGL is the built-in support for web services. With "service" being one of the main keywords of the language allowing you to create or consume a web service, you don't have to worry too much about the plethora of WS-* standards out there and can focus on building or using the web services that are key to your business.
Jazz technology was a marketing playground and brought out all the various cliches one might expect including Jazz bands and Jazz cafes. However, this didn't disguise the fact that this is a very powerful platform for software development. The first tranche of products based on Jazz were announced at the conference and of these, Rational Team Concert (RTC) was the one that interested me. RTC brings together a number of the tools that developers, project managers and others need (even if they don't always use them). Bringing planning, source code control, project tracking, defect tracking, process automation, build management and collaboration tools into one integrated product seems to have worked pretty well. We will be experimenting with RTC over the coming months to see if it lives up to the initial good impressions.
Of course, given that RBD/RDi/RTC and Rational Application Developer (that we use for our general development) are all built on the Eclipse workbench, we can use all these tools together in a consistent way.
It was difficult to drag me away from all the excitement of the conference to attend a number of social events. My attendance at these events had nothing whatsoever to do with the free beer on offer, but was all about meeting and talking to as many conference attendees as I could before I fell over (with exhaustion). Discos, video games, a concert by The Wallflowers (nope I hadn't heard much about them either, but they're huge in the US, are fronted by Bob Dylan's youngest son and managed a pretty good gig) and a trip to Universal Studios were all on the agenda and enthusiastically attended.
A highlight for many people, including me, was a keynote speech by William Shatner. Yes, we all wondered how Captain Kirk/TJ Hooker/everything else he's done, could possibly be relevant to a software development conference but his contrasts of the job of making films and TV programmes with making software was not too bad and were illustrated by some funny stories. He certainly managed to hold the attention of the room, with most attendees not even checking their email for a whole hour!
Andy
We found a problem when doing the install of RBD and RDi, this is addressed in this technote, which outlines what you should do. The simple answer seems to be if you have done the install then you have to sit tight in order to do the update, and if you have not then do you need web services right now?
03 August 2008
An update on this if you look at the bottom of this thread on the EGL cafe it has details on what you need to do.
http://www-949.ibm.com/software/rational/cafe/thread/1098?tstart=0