Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2008 3:35 PM
To: Business Rules Forum
Subject: Re: [BR_forum] Fall conference in Nashville
I learned a lot too! There were some things that I never expected to see (anytime soon anyway...) such as running BR programs on a cell phone! Who'd a thunk it? At every conference, I tend to go home with something that I consider to be my personal unexpected "rock star" of the conference. It's usually a concept that ignites my imagination and gets me thinking of all of the possibilities. Keep in mind that what I pick are things that are particularly interesting, intriguing or appropriate to ME (or one of my clients), so your mileage may certainly vary. There was something for everybody at this conference.
The cool thing for this Nashville conference is that I came home with several different "rock stars":
BUTTONS.EXE
Kevin's button workshop was the thing that I looked forward to since he unveiled it at the 2007 fall conference in a quick demo. A nice looking user interface is one of those things that can make or break your application - and your users' response to it. If you are selling vertical packages, then this is even MORE important because marketing is about perception of a product. (I write all custom code and have yet to sell anything twice.) With BR's ability to resize the screen (which my users take full advantage of), graphical buttons - especially with text on them - can get really nasty looking when resized. I am really looking forward to creating some nice button sets and being able to regenerate them with Kevin's (Western Canadian Software) program to keep them looking great at any screen resolution size. It also lets you use the same base button and add different text and glyphs (the "icon" part) to create buttons "sets" for your programs...much more professional than what I'm doing now! The other thing that I enjoyed about this workshop was getting to PLAY in GIMP (a graphical image editor). It was fun! Did I know what I was doing? Heck no. But I managed to finish my button anyway
FILE IO
I have been intrigued by the concept behind Gabriel's FILE IO, which is part data dictionary (like I use on the IBM AS400 applications I write), part documentation, part data file debugger (the data crawler portion). I like this a lot because the system does the hard work and the variables are still descriptive so I can still understand my code when I'm debugging or writing it. I plan to create an alternative engine for FILE IO (when I have time...you know how it goes...) to use my existing .CSV file layouts instead of the built-in FILE IO text file formats. Then I can have the best of both worlds without giving up any of the superior technology that Gabriel has built into the product. He has created FILE IO so it would be very easy to implement different file layout source formats. Someone could writing an interface for context manager layout, BR internal file layouts from the old FILELAY.WB program or any number of alternatives that we're using.
SCREEN IO
Gabriel has been working hard on a new product that works in conjunction with FILE IO. It's called SCREEN IO and it's a RAD (rapid application development) front end for BR which allows you to use FILE IO for the data access part and a graphical front end to design your screens. The demo was quite impressive and I'm sure everybody who wasn't there will want to see this product when it's finished and available for sale.
MYEDIT
Ryan Mills gave a half day workshop on the newest version of MyEdit (MyEditBR). This new version has even more ties that connect it directly to BR, such as a wonderful built-in debugger! Though MyEdit remains free (and the new debugger too! Woohoo!), there will be some new advanced features that will require a paid license. I'm sure that Ryan will post all of those license details as soon as he has them all worked out. I'm looking forward to hearing about new goodies that he adds to the "pro" version as time goes on.
I confess that I haven't been using MyEdit for BR program editing up til now, though I am familiar with it. But after seeing the power of the debugger, I'm sold. And I DO love to play in the colors editor so I can customize the way I display my BR code on the screen. (I still can't get behind that dark blue background that Kevin prefers <s>. It's a good thing that MyEdit has the flexibility to make MY version look any way I want it to!)
The other thing that I didn't know about MyEdit until this conference is that you can load up lots of programs/files into the editor at once (subject to your license limits) and make global changes to them all - at once! As I begin to convert a few things over to FILE IO, this will be really helpful, as I can search/replace across many programs at once, while having them all loaded into the editor at the same time (again...subject to the terms of your MyEditBR license).
MINI TOPICS - EXAMPLE PROGRAMS
George gave us a really wonderful resource at the conference - a BR application that includes loads of test programs - all tied to a menu where the programs are grouped by type - that demonstrate the usage of all sorts of BR features and functions, including GUI controls. (run on sentence, I know...) The example program that I had hoped to see (and he delivered!) was to show how to combine multiple GUI controls into one screen and make it seamless to the user when they are clicking back and forth between them. I was having trouble getting my mind around this concept. Each small example program is pared down to the bare bones so you can really understand what's going on. I am looking forward to spending a few hours going through all of the other demo programs he included there which we didn't have time to get to at the conference. This is a fantastic resource!
PRINTING DIRECTLY to PDF and EMAILING the reports
David Blankenship presented a Nifty Neato that will be quite useful to me (and perhaps to you). He printed customer statements (could have been invoices or any other form) from his BR application using NWP directly to PDF. He also demonstrated the option of Emailing those statements to clients seamlessly with Email Monitor (an application that he co-developed with Dixon Epperson). In fact, David ran his customer statement program and all of us at the conference found the PDF version of it sitting in our Email inboxes. VERY cool. Several of our BR colleagues already use Email Monitor and have reaped loads of benefit from it.
David used a PDF driver (available on the internet for FREE) that has a command line interface and does NOT require that you stop and name the destination and name of the PDF file when you run it! So you can create PDF files from your BR application - invisibly to the user - if you print with NWP. This alone is reason enough to prod me into moving to NWP for my clients. I think I'm starting to catch the NWP wave now. So many companies now allow you to receive Email statements, invoices, reports, etc that this feature is an "expected" option in most business accounting software these days. Now we can do this from within BR without any input from the user. And if you want to automatically Email those reports/statements/invoices to a client halfway across the world to save snail mail postage (and time)? Use Email Monitor. It's not even expensive! I may even install it at my problem client (who likes to bail out of programs without telling me) and configure my err handling routine to Email a message to ME whenever anyone gets an error. The message could include program name, date/time, user, error number and line, etc. Sneaky
RAPID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT
Richard Forrester demonstrated his text-based screen generator/RAD product and showed us the benefits of such a system: File maintenance programs can all run from a single central program - getting all of the screen and file detail from data files without hard-coding one program at a time for each file you need to maintain. Richard discussed the types of features that would be needed in a GUI version of such a product. This dovetailed with Gabriel's SCREEN IO product, which was pretty much exactly what Richard was suggesting! I confess that I hadn't thought of the concept of "centralized execution" before (I just made up that term...). I had a program generator years ago that CREATED programs based on all of the same kinds of screen details - the text labels, data input fields and attributes, validation routines, etc. But mine generated a separate WB program each time. It never occurred to me that ONE CENTRAL program could handle this for all of your files and still have it be extremely detailed and customizable for each file. The user wouldn't know that these are the same program with a different set of control information. Wow. Think of the amount of debugging that this eliminates.
There were so many other things well worth mentioning at the conference, but I should give others a chance to chime in too. So I'll cut this short.
FOR ME, the biggest rock star of the conference was Chris Shields, who ran BR programs from a web page on the internet! Incredible. He was working with live BR data too, not an HTML copy of BR data. These were BR internal files! My imagination is taking me all over the place with the possibilities of this. I can offer my clients a whole 'nuther level of features with such a concept.
So to everybody else who came to the Fall Conference in Nashville....what were YOUR rock stars?
-- Susan
Doug Meenen wrote:
A big Thank you to all who made the conference a big success!
I learned a lot and am looking forward to trying out the new programming methods.
Good to see all of the developers again plus the new members.
Doug Meenen
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