By Saad Ahmad, Vice President of Smart IS International
This is a list of technical enhancements over the last few releases. This list is not complete and if I am wrong on exact versions, please let me know.
- Groovy- 2007
This has been around for a while, but it needs to be emphasized. Please use it when appropriate- it will make your life so much easier! It allows you to create high quality solutions with less effort, for example:
- Calling external web services
- Calling 3rd party java applications, e.g. sftp, svn etc.
- Represent complex logic
Groovy should be a key component of your overall solution. If you are not seeing any groovy in your code, make sure you have the right folks on your team. If you are doing in-house development, then invest in some training.
2. RF Forms in Java- 2009
Definitely a good direction to obsolete the old style RF forms in factor of Java. Now you have options to extend base forms rather than old way of copying code and changing it.
I would like to see something like DDA to work on RF so that people can develop simple forms without writing any code, but we are not there yet. But overall a good feature.
3. Jasper Reports- 2011.2
It is part of 2011.2 and it looks promising !
4. HTTP Protocol used by MOCA- 2010+
Previously MOCA used a proprietary protocol for traffic between clients and servers. Now MOCA users use http protocol. This is definitely a good direction. The connections are backwards compatible where new versions can open a Classic Port where older clients can connect to. New Clients can connect to older servers by using “host:port” syntax.
5. Query level hooks in MOCA- 2011
So you find a badly written query that is deep within the standard code which is in C or Java. Previously the only option you had was to override the whole component; now it is possible to install a hook that would rewrite that query.
The performance is impressive. I ran a simple “select* from dual” 10,000 times where the hook scanned an array in Java to find the mapped rewritten query. The net overhead was about 2 seconds over the 10,000 executions. Exact times will be variable but it is an option is such cases.
Do not consider this as as option for enhancements, only it when bug is a bad query deep within standard code which is in Java or C.
6. Clustering enhancements- 2011
Earlier versions of MOCA were not cluster-aware. If you are using an active-active cluster, you needed to actively manage what runs on each node. Now you have a setup that will be controlled by MOCA. If you are using active-passive configuration, then you can probably keep using the OS level options, but for active-active this will be very helpful.
7. Active X completely removed- 2008
All Active X components are removed from the GUI and integrator explorer is no longer supported. There are ways to get older Integrator Explorer to work with newer versions, but don’t go there. Use the new screens that part of the Dlx Client.
Originally published on saadwmsblog.blogspot.com
