SOA Training
From time to time a new acronym appears in the IT press, this time it was
SOA. My initial thoughts were "What does Service Oriented Architecture actually mean and how will it fit in with our
ALM Training message.
The first place I looked was
Wikipedia - the"font of all knowledge". Fourteen pages of information later, my questions were answered.
The second thing I needed to do was to decide which courses our clients would be interested in attending and who would benefit. Sometimes it can prove difficult to cater for all roles.
I have identified the groups as follows:
- IT Managers
- Architects
- Analysts
- Designers
- Software Engineers
Now the idea is to ensure that our SOA training offering matches their specific areas of interest. So far we have put together, with the help of a SOA Evangelist, the following courses:
- SOA Services Oriented Software Design - target audience: IT Managers, Architects, Analysts and Designers.
- SOA an Introduction - target audience: Architects, IT Managers and Software Engineers
- SOA for Managers - target audience: IT Managers
We are always looking at ways to enhance our training message, so watch this space for future SOA courses.
StyleVision - Not quite as stylish or visionary as I would have liked
We have been using the XSLT editor StyleVision from Altova since the start of this year. We use it to build the reports generated by our pension system, Imago Front Office, which provides a prospective or existing pension customer with an illustrative report. I have found that with using StyleVision, having the ability to easily and simply create conditional logic, to drag and drop XML tag values onto the design and to create dynamic designs, has been invaluable in the work that we do; there have been a number of weird and bizarre "quirks" of StyleVision which have resulted in an overwhelming desire on occasions to throw my laptop out of the window and into the waters of Portsmouth Harbour.
When asked to produce a blog, I thought that I would take the time to provide some solutions and work arounds for problems that I have encountered when using StyleVision.
Page breaks
When I was experiencing problems with page breaks whilst working on a project a couple of months back, I found very little information on the web about similar page break problems; so I hope that this will help.
The problem was that, on occasions, page breaks were causing the system to produce a blank page in the middle of the report. The page breaks had been in place within the style sheet for a number of years and this had not caused a problem before. Despite the fact that there was no space between the last element and the page break, when the last element before the page break encroached upon the end of the page, the page break inserted a blank page within the PDF. There did not seem to be a way to give the page break any sort of attribute to get it not to produce, what was in effect two page breaks. Having looked through the various options in the styles window, I spotted that there were a number of page break options under the "paged media" tab. However, despite having attempted to select the content and give it the attribute of avoid page break inside, it was having no effect.
By way of explanation - if you take the above paragraph as an example, with an enforced page break after it and a number of conditional pieces of text and tables above it, each containing multiple lines; the above paragraph could very easily be pushed to the bottom of the page and onto the next one. However, for certain circumstances, the text is pushed to the very end of the page, the page break would (with no logic around it) create the phantom page. It would be extremely difficult to write an XPath expression to produce validation around the page break, to incorporate the number of years that the illustrations was for, the number of funds that had been invested in or the various pieces of conditional text. In addition, any complex logic that had been written and rigorously tested would be wasted time if any of the spacing above the paragraph was changed at a later date. Through a great deal of trial and error, I eventually found the following solution.
- If the problem is not caused by a table, you will need to create a table to place the text or condition onto as well as the page break
- Highlight the table node in the design tree window
- Under the HTML tab of the properties window, set the "rules" attribute to group
- You will see that the table will have a defined line around it, this will not appear in the report
- Now select the "paged media" tab on the styles window and set the "page-break-in" attribute to avoid
This will now mean that if the newly grouped table is not able to fit onto the end of the page it will start on the beginning of the next page. This will stop the page break ever coming into contact with the bottom of the page.
In the next exciting instalment of the DT StyleVision blog, I will be sharing with you the rather bizarre work around that I found for solving an issue with the column widths of tables generated by dragging a parent node onto the design. No matter what I set the column width percentages to, they were still showing 50/50.
Labels: Dunstan Thomas, Imago, StyleVision
Performance with Silk Performer!
The internet and web applications have over time become accepted as part of our daily lives, but how infuriating is it when the site you are trying to access is running really slowly; well Silk Performer is a fantastic tool which allows those of us that develop all these site to ensure that it performs within an acceptable criteria for everyone.
A very flexible, easy to use software tool that allows performance tests to be planned, recorded and then executed across many environments, with differing numbers of users, enabling the simulation of different scenarios. A comprehensive set of charts, graphs and reports allows the user to analyse and isolate potential problems, storing the results in a repository for future use.
The Anti-Modeller
In my travels I'm often confronted by people who are genuinely confused about why we bother modelling our design work in UML; to which I always give the standard answers of improved communication through the use of diagrams instead of text, a common industry standard language, etc, etc, etc....
But why are there so many people opposed to the idea of visual modelling? The question confused me for a while until I came across a number of examples of models which had been subjected to the blueprinting approach to modelling. For those not familiar with the two schools of visual modelling, blueprinting and sketching, blueprinting involves visually modelling your design in extreme detail without necessarily needing that detail. The sketching approach on the other hand says that you model complex parts of the system in order to help you think through the problem, once you have solved the problem you stop modelling.
I can understand how developers who have not used UML before and are then made to take a blueprinting approach to their designs would find the exercise tedious and probably consider a lot of it a waste of time. I believe that blueprinting has it's place particularly if you're going to off-shore your development for example; but I believe that by far for most developers the best use of UML is achieved through sketching especially now when we have tools which can reverse engineer code and produce class diagrams for use as documentation.
What is new in Raquest Version 2.4
RaQuest is a Requirements Management tool for Enterprise Architect (EA). Requirements Management may be used for managing the requirements of systems and applications effectively. With RaQuest, you can track changes of requirements and manage requirements with a range of features. RaQuest is the ideal tool for the enhanced development of your software applications.
The new features of 2.4 are:
- Multiple launch feature
- Feature to configure type and status of requirement
- Feature to color status of each project
- Feature related to Relationship Map
- List of update log and assigned members
- Feature to provide ID for each package and to reassign ID
- Feature to obtain the number of status for each package
- Feature add options and to separate project option from local option
For more detailed information, please visit http://www.raquest.com/products/raq_version24.htm
