What's New in Rational HATS 7.5.1?

Now that the latest is out in the wild, I'd like to show off some of the new features. This release includes a few new very high priority features that customers and business partners have been asking for. There are more features in the works (which I am well aware of but cannot disclose due to our NDA), that will come out in the next version (named either HATS 7.6 or HATS 8.0).

Upgrading to 7.5.1

This release is available via Passport Advantage, or if you already have 7.5.0.x installed, you can upgrade directly using Installation Manager. Keep in mind that the first time you load up your workspace after performing the upgrade, it WILL upgrade all your projects in your workspace automatically without prompting. 

New features

The first new feature is the inclusion of some new templates to make the UI look more like 2010 than 2001. This was a complaint many of us partners had - that although the tool could port a green screen to the internet with relative ease, it still looked dated for the web. The two new templates are 'Finance', and 'Industry'. The later is shown here below.

HATS has for some time supported mobile applications. These were specifically for the Windows Mobile IE, and not very pretty on other mobile platforms such as iPhone or Blackberry. The new iPhone support produces a slick UI. Most companies that want to have this functionality are also only going to want to surface applications behind their corporate firewall. This will require an AT&T service with a dedicated drop behind the firewall, or at least a VPN client for the iPhone so the iPhone users will be browsing from within the firewall. Those with Blackberry Enterprise Servers already have this functionality without any special VPN or dedicated lines. Creating an app targeted at the iPhone is as simple as selecting the "Optimize Options for Mobile Devices" on the project creation wizard.


Also new is client side AJAX support for pulling screen refreshes dynamically. Previously this was done using the "Asynchronous Applet", which is now deprecated. The applet was a signed Java applet that ran in the browser and refreshed the HTML automatically upon host screen refresh. This was useful in cases where a timer would update the green screen without user input, and those changes needed to be refreshed on the web browser. The caveat was that Java applet usage is widely disabled in browsers,  and the applet ran on random TCP/IP ports, giving network administrators headaches trying to track down the source of what they thought might be port scanning tool, or network hack. Now all this can be handled over common HTTP (port 80/443) traffic, with only minor additional traffic headaches. Many sites use Ajax now, and corporate fire walled sites increasingly so. This AJAX feature also handles that troublesome issue of when the user closed the browser, the host connection would stay alive. Now it kills the back end connection (which is configurable).

For those using macros to combine heterogeneous screen data, you can now pull non-text plane data such as information from the color, field, or DBCS planes. In otherwords, you can pull in a global variable such as "CYAN" from the color plane rather than just the text array. Field attributes can also be pulled in as extracts or global variables.

WebSphere Portal users now can have single sign on with JSR 168 HATS portlets. This was a nagging issue that forced many customers to stick with the IBM API portlets so they could manage SSO.

A new inline calendar widget provides a much improved feature that often was lost when popup dialog boxes were blocked in the browser. This inline widget uses CSS and DIV elements to dynamically open and close the calendar picker, even with popups disabled.

The Web Services signature is also much improved. No more extraneous properties - only the ones you need - mainly the prompts, extracts, and chaining properties (if any). This will make web services creation much simpler.

If you are interested in seeing more, I'll be two not one, but TWO presentations at IBM Innovate this year. The conference starts June 6th. App Developers get $100 discount w promo code MACT http://bit.ly/b5wHVn. This is a great conference for developers, testers, and IT architects. Hope to see you there!

First year's batch of Linux distro's released

Just a few weeks ago Ubuntu launched Ubuntu 10.4 codenamed Lucid Lynx. Now, the Fedora team has launched Fedora 13.


If you run and experiment with Red Hat type software, Fedora a is a good platform to play around with. It is the experimental playground of Red Hat and most of the guts of Red Hat are in Fedora. Fedora is just a bit more 'cutting edge'.  WebSphere App Server runs on it nicely with a few tricks I've mentioned before. This one is a fast distro. Don't let the number 13 scare you (after all 13 is a good luck number in some cultures). This is the distro we run for some of our internal web sites.

Next on deck in the release cycle is OpenSUSE, scheduled to be released in July. OpenSuse is my favorite server based distro. What works in the enterprise version (SLES) will probably work in OpenSuse. In version 11.2 I have Lotus Domino 8.5.1 with no patches, a Rational Team Concert server, along with the RTC build engine. I've not done a single special patch other than regular software updates from the standard repositories. I think this is the ideal version if you want to run a lean, agile, collaborative ALM environment (i.e. Team Concert), or if you need a quick and easy test environment setup. Many of the IBM Rational desktop development and testing tools run on OpenSuse Linux also. Functional Tester is a good candidate here.

One recommendation that I have is that if you run production, test, and development environments, some configurations are very operating system specific. For example, DB2 on Linux is a different creature than DB2 on Windows. Don't mix and match here. You can get away with it ONLY if you keep everything either all 64 bit, or all 32 bit. Dont' expect to backup a 64 bit DB2/Linux database and restore on a 32 bit DB2/Windows server. It ain't happening.

My preferred desktop distro is Ubuntu, although I have several software packages that are Windoze only . The latest version of Ubuntu is truly a great great great platform. It is a good candidate for replacement of enterprise desktops in places like customer service centers, where there is limited commercial software needed other than a web browser and email client. This version runs Lotus Notes 8.5.1 like a dream, and is supported by IBM out of the box. If you are on an Exchange environment you can run the native application Evolution and connect to your back end Exchange server. Firefox is the default browser, and an excellent one at that. For office productivity there is Open Office, which is also included. I am a BIG advocate of Open Office. As a business owner, I use Open Office exclusively. Yes, I can read/write/create MS Office file types and have only an occasional issue with Powerpoint files (mainly if they are too large).  This tour of Ubuntu is a good layman's overview. Ubuntu 10.4 is their long term support version, and receives support for 3 full years on the desktop, and 5 years on the server (for paid subscriptions of course).

I have a few other Linux distributions to mention. First is Mandriva. Now I've only installed and played around with it once, but did not care much for their enhancements. That said, there is quite a following out there.  Puppy Linux is a neat little distrubution that is great to install on a USB thumb drive and boot up an otherwise dead, old pc. It runs entirely from RAM, and thus is surprisingly fast. It uses several packages from the Ubuntu stream, so expect a release sometime later this year. I've managed to save some data from old drives using this distro. This is not a server class distro.
Slackware 13.1 was released yesterday. This is the Linux expert's distro is not for the uninitiated. It must be compiled from source prior to using. That said, it makes for a great firewall, proxy server, or HTTP server, as well as a hacker's desktop. Once up and running, its fast, secure, and well.. fast.

On the pure Unix side, OpenBSD (which is not Linux), released their latest on 5/19.  BSD is the time tested standard for Internet servers. Yahoo runs BSD for their Internet site. At one point, Microsoft's Hotmail ran BSD (not Windows).

My apologies to any other distro's I've not mentioned. The ones above are the big players in this space and the ones I work with the most (or ever as the case may be). Anyone have any favorites that I've left off?

Free training site for IBM D series storage

I rarely work with storage systems - I'm a software guy. But on occasion I need to manipulate storage arrays for either performance tuning, or new installations. IBM has a new product group of storage called their "D-series", which is geared toward mid-sized businesses and they've put out a training site to help customers get started with external storage arrays. Its a very well put together flash-based site and I learned a good bit about storage basics I did not already know.

http://ibmdsseriestraining.com/

Direct Attach Storage, I know about, but SANS were a black art until I read this.

Rational Team Concert for Visual Studio 2010 - Coming Soon.

The Jazz team announced that RTC will support VS2010 in RTC version 2.0.0.2 iFix3, which is currently at milestone 1 build. This includes full client support on Windows 7. This build is primarily for developers that work with VS - if you don't work with VS, then you can/should ignore the build. The interim fixes appear to be coming out every 45 days or so, so expect a full release of this iFix by the end of May.

In case you didn't know, the RTC product development team uses RTC as its own build environment. Talk about eating your own dog food! As all the Jazz products are developed in the open, anyone can check on the status of an iteration, or submit work items as defects, bugs, or requests for enhancements. The RTC project plans are  found at http://jazz.net/jazz/web/projects/Rational%20Team%20Concert#action=com.ibm.team.apt.viewPlan&page=viewModel&id=_1SrHYFOUEd-uhOvgaO8mvA.

RTC already supports the previous version of Visual Studio (2005 and 2008). If you are not familiar with the interaction of Team Concert and Visual Studio, here are some videos on getting started with the product.

Getting Started with Rational Team Concert and Microsoft Visual Studio - Part 1

Getting Started with Rational Team Concert and Microsoft Visual Studio - Part 2

Getting Started with Rational Team Concert and Microsoft Visual Studio - Part 3

Regular Expressions explained

I've tried to explain this topic in a couple of classes that I teach, but I can do no better than Andrei Zmievski's post on SlideShare. This guy's post is so excellent - it is THE best education source on Regular Expressions that I think I've ever seen.

Andrei's Regex Clinic

View more presentations from Andrei Zmievski.

That said, sometimes as a consultant, I don't have access to the Internet and thus can't get to this site, or I just need a quick and dirty lookup and don't have time to wade through a presentation like this.

In that situation I refer to my pocket regex guide. The one I have currently has bent pages, permanently opens to the Java section, and the pages are all stained from my dirty paws, but its been worth its weight in gold.

IE 6 Falls even lower in the market share - IE 6 Shame List grows

Netmarketshare, a site that analyzes Internet technology trends, posts that IE6 is down to 17.58% in April. Firefox 3.6 nearly matches that, and Firefox 3.5 adds another 5.8%. If you are not building your Internet or Intranet sites to match the features of modern browsers, you are missing out. If your development shop is STILL coding only to IE6, then you are committing an act of suicide because if these applications no longer work in other browsers, you are eventually going to have to refactor them.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you should know that IE7 has also been surpassed, and IE8 which has been out since Mar 19, 2009. Microsoft is even being quite public about their intent for Internet Explorer 9 and support of HTML5, the open h.264 video codec, and CSS3. A fact which is very welcome news.

Internet Explorer 6 was formally given a funeral back in March to help spread the word that it is DEAD, that it hinders future web innovation, that it was broken from the start, and that EVERYONE, large enterprises included should move off it to something newer. Some organizations are going so far as to officially embrace Firefox as the standard (which is the case with our company).

Google also announced they have ceased support of the browser, and other major vendors are following suit. If you are a large enterprise (which comprises the bulk of the laggards), what is your policy for web browser support? Have you made efforts to migrate off? Have you inventoried your public and private web pages for possible breakage when moving? If not, you should. If you have a public web page that is only supported in IE6, and breaks in others,  go back and look at the chart linked above. You are not just hindering sales, you are hurting your brand when someone comes to your site with any other browser and sees a broken UI. It reflects poorly on the company's image. It shows that the company is not staying up with the times.

Protect your brand and personal reputation by acting now. Otherwise, you might start seeing your name on the IE 6 Shame List. Check out the responses by the posters.