on October 4, 2006
This is going to a long day. Starting at 9 AM, finishing at 6:30 PM. 6 sessions, and one extra in the middle of it!
Guy Bowerman has a tutorial composed of 3 sessions on Java, from the basics, to AJAX and J/Foundation. The first one is similar to my speech, but focusing more in the internals, I still like mine better, but I do appreciate competition (or at least attempt thereof), it benefits the users.
His second part explained JSP and he actually has a very nice easy of explaining it and how you can implement a bit of AJAX in a web page, by just changing basic things. There’s no way of making AJAX code looks different than a spaghetti bowl, but at least you know how to make it interact with the engine.
It’s a good example to show that IDS scales wonderfully for such AJAX apps, where some struggle as database queries explode the engine.
Guy finished with J/Foundation, which I know a bit, but he explained Solano: embedding a server in the engine! Pretty intriguing.
Just between Guy’s two last sessions, Cindy Fung explained us the roadmap of IDS with Cheetah and Panther. Cheetah is going to be a killer! Can you make an application developer dream with a database engine? Well, guess what, they can!
A subliminal message is “Use your DBA to bring more value, not fixing databases”. IDS needs no fixing: the average is 1 DBA for ONE THOUSAND instances in retail… This engine is perfect to comply with France’s 35 work hours per week!
By the way, the business partners of IDS on the soccer application are: IMP AG and Cairos Technologies AG.
Jan Musil detailed his work on an XML datablade, with the use of IDS’ support of virtual tables. His sub-1000-lines-of-code C program extends IDS to support joint with tables mapped as XML files on the disk. You can build joint queries with a “normal” table and an XML table if you wish! His needs were read-only for the moment, but it is a very nice way to add reference tables such as country-level geographical data. He will release the source code sometimes soon, so that everyone can compile the blade for its system. More on that later.
I did a lecture on how to use PHP with IDS, similar to what you can find in DB2 Magazine, with plenty of live examples. PHP is quite nice, PDO makes data access a lot easier. But enough, go and read my article if you want to know more.
We ended the day with Jan Musil explaining how to migrate a 4GL program to EGL. I did a foreword to his presentation with quite a few announcements Rational people allowed me to do, with the traditional IBM warnings, of course. EGL is maturing at a good pace. Jan’s approach to the demo is very interesting as he did not use the usual stores demo but a more intelligible one that illustrates beautifully the converted source code.
Finishing at 6:30 PM is difficult for “die Amerikaners” here! Most of them were already having dinner in a cave, where I joined them later…
Once more, this is my custom trail among the nearly 60 sessions of the day…