Four Js Development Tools Forum

The next major release of Genero, Genero 3.10 is targetted for release June 27th.  As always before that we run an Early Access Program (EAP) where you, our customers, can download, evaluate, and provide valuable feedback on this release before it is officially released.

This EAP is scheduled to start on March 27th and to run for approximately 10 weeks.  We are giving you advance notice of the dates so you can schedule in some time to participate in the EAP.  The EAP is open to any customer under maintenance. 

What do we expect you to do in an EAP?

• Download, and verify that you can recompile your program(s)
• Run some or all of your QA tests and verify that key areas of your application still run.
• Look at the new features and experiment adding them into your application, and provide feedback or suggested improvements on them.

What are the Benefits to you of participating in the EAP?

• Increased quality of the Genero release.
• You can ensure that new features are able to be used in your programs.
• You can verify that we have not removed or broken anything that your system is dependent upon.
• You can get a head start of preparing the next release of your product that will use this particular Genero version.

What happens if I don’t participate in the EAP.  You may find that when you eventually upgrade to the latest Genero version that ...

• your code does not compile cleanly and you have to spend time and money refactoring your code
• your QA tests may fail and you may have to spend time and money refactoring your code
• new features are not able to be used as you would like and so aren’t used at all

(hopefully the above never happens, but the time to catch this is in the EAP, not after the release)

I can give plenty of examples from the support desk of customers who did not participate in the EAP and then discovered that they could not use a new release and or new feature as they would like.  An example I like to give is the base.StringTokenizer methods.  In the documentation you will see there are two methods, create and createExt http://4js.com/online_documentation/fjs-fgl-manual-html/#c_fgl_ClassStringTokenizer_methods.html.   The createExt() method was added after the release as users were reporting that the create() method did not cater for case of nulls and delimiters.  We would rather have got that feedback in the EAP, and not after the release, so that we could have modified create() instead of adding the createExt method. 

More recently with GWC-JS, we are seeing users report issues with the GWC-JS that were there during the EAP, but they are not reporting until many months or over a year after the release.  The browserMultiPage Style has been added mid release because customers are telling us that they did not like fact that all GWC-JS programs were run in the same browser tab.   We would rather have got that feedback during the EAP and incorporated feedback into the release, rather than nearly a year later.

I want to tell another story from the last EAP.  One of the features in 3.00 was improved compilation time http://4js.com/online_documentation/fjs-fgl-manual-html/#c_fgl_Migrate_to_300_compile_time.html.  We asked in the EAP for feedback on what levels of improvement you were actually seeing.  Of the 70+ downloads in the EAP, we had 2 responses !!! (thank you Candy and Jeroni, who both had about 300% improvement).  We would’ve liked more responses than this, and we did get some responses privately from developers offline.  So to motivate you to participate in the EAP, there will be prize(s) for things like EAP participation at the World Wide Developer Conference tentatively scheduled for end of September 2017.

So I encourage you today to note the 3.10 EAP and release dates, and try and plan for some time to be available so that you can contribute during the EAP period.

Thanks,

Reuben

PS I didn’t say what will be in EAP but here are some teasers ...

FGL - Click on Cell in an array
GDC - Automatic Update
GMI/GMA - Support for SCROLLGRID
GST - Two views in Code Editor
GRW - Transformation of Data before Report processing.

Dear customers,



Four Js has opened the subscription for Genero EAP 3.10. The EAP will start on Monday, March 27th (office hours GMT+1), but if you wish to subscribe before that, you can do so at this web page: https://4js.com/download/eap/

Your subscription will be validated within 24 hours when you will receive a confirmation email and an acknowledgment of genero-eap mailing list subscription.



Best regards,


Olivier - Four Js Support

Dear customers,


We have made the decision to postpone the General Availability of Genero Enterprise version 3.10 to September 19.

As many of you are aware, Genero Enterprise uses Qt libraries to be cross-platform across all operating system desktops. Qt have just launched Qt 5.9 - a major release - and we want to incorporate it into Genero Enterprise so that you can take advantage of its features as quickly as possible. The most visible benefit is with the WebComponent engine now based on Chromium 56 rather than Chromium 45.

This also give us three additional months to fine tune our v3.10 release and add some other 'goodies' we have been working on.

We thank you for your participation so far in the EAP, and hope you continue to contribute. There will of course be more 3.10 snapshots. There maybe a slightly longer gap between a GDC and GST snapshot, subject to the initial work involved in upgrading the Qt version.

The proposed release date ties in with the World Wide Developer Conference http://4js.com/2017-wwdc17/ and we hope to see you there.

Feel free to contact your local support if you have any questions.

Best regards,


Four Js