From Green to Glory

A great article called From Green to Glory authored by WebFacing’s own Jiayun Zhu and Hania Abd-El-Razik highlights what’s new in the latest release of WebFacing and HATS technologies within WDSC 7.0. The article is part of the latest edition of IBM Systems Magazine, i5 edition.

Main highlights include the ability to create Web projects that take full advantage of both technologies to form one UI modernization solution, and the ability to create a Rich Client user interface to your green screen applications through HATS Rich Client support.

What’s Your Preference?

WDSC comes with a smattering of preferences that can be customized to tweak the workbench to your liking. The good news is they are all centralized in a single dialog (Window > Preferences). The bad news is there are lots of preference and finding the one you want can be a challenge.

Of course that assumes you already know that such a preference exists. That is why I sometimes just browse through all the preference pages. It’s amazing the stuff you can learn just by doing this. Obviously you learn what preferences exist, but quite often I find a preference for a function I didn’t even know existed!

To be honest, I don’t customize that many preferences. But there are a few that I change immediately whenever I create a new workspace (of course now I’ll just export / import them). So here are my top preferences:

• Background color for the currenLine in LPEX (LPEX Editor > Appearance). The default for this is a light blue which I find hard to see. So I always change this to yellow so it’s very easy to see which line the cursor is on.
• Editor font size (LPEX Editor > Appearance for LPEX and General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts for other editors). Dropping the font size 1 or 2 points is a great way to crank out a bit more screen real estate from my ThinkPad screen.
• Enable all capabilities (General > Capabilities). The idea of having capabilities that could be turned on / off seemed like a good idea initially. But I find it gets in the way more often than not, so I just enable all of them.
• Keyboard shortcuts (General > Keys). I always use Ctrl + m to maximize / minimize editors and views and it drives me crazy that it doesn’t work for LPEX (because LPEX overrides it for some other action). So I always go here and remove the Ctrl + m assignment from LPEX. Warning: doing this will also disable whatever action LPEX has assigned to the Ctrl + m keyboard shortcut.
• Templates (Remote Systems > Remote Systems LPEX Editor > iSeries Parsers > …. for LPEX and Java > Editor > Templates for Java). I use these mostly for my Java development to insert the standard IBM copyrights into each new file.
• PDE Target Platform (Plug-in Development > Target Platform). We use Eclipse to develop WDSC, so often we are running two copies of the workbench at the same time (one where we write the code and the other where the code is running). So I download a plain vanilla version of Eclipse to write my Java code and point the Target Platform preference at the most recent version of WDSC I have installed. Then the code I write overrides the version of the code in the WDSC I have pointed to when I run and debug.

So what’s your top preferences?

PASE Yourself

Here is a short and to the point Zend forum entry I ran into that answers What is PASE?

You may find yourself saying, “I didn’t know I could do that within i5/OS!”

Machine Readable Patents

Whenever you and I write software, we usually find ourselves having to design and code a few algorithms or systems. The developers on our team, have always been encouraged to submit novel methods as invention disclosures for review and patenting so that our published products are covered from an intellectual property standpoint.

Tired of re-customizing every new workspace you use?

If you usually customize your WDSC workspace (eg. change fonts, re-organize/create new perspectives, etc.) and are finding it a hassle to do this every time you switch to a new one, know that the process can be simplified!

Visualizing the Process

There are times when each of us needs to see the big picture. A software application contains so many layers of details that as we develop software, our brains prevent us from recalling those details and their relationships. When working on some aspect of an application, I need to remind myself of where it fits into the overall scheme of things. This is especially true if I am working four levels deep within an application call stack and a task switch occurs, such as for lunch, or a meeting, or when my spouse calls with a shopping list. I need to overcome my inertia and regain my bearings by popping my previous state off of my internal stack. These days, this can be quite a hurdle, especially right after lunch.. As such, I find that the tooling that both you and I use isn’t very helpful.