OpenInsight 10 and the next UK RUG

OpenInsight 10 taskbar progress bars

Another very nice feature has just been written into the OI 10 release and one that many OpenInsight developers will no doubt be keen to exploit.  One of the most useful features introduced with the Windows 7 taskbar was the ability to display progress information directly on your forms taskbar button.  From OpenInsight 10, developers will be able to include this lovely feature in their applications through two brand new WINDOW properties.You can find full details about this new feature, including screen shots of the different coloured progress bars on the Building OpenInsight 10 blog.

EMEA RUG – Please also add Wednesday 25th September into your diary.  Mike will be over from the USA that week and as usual I intend to host a RUG for our EMEA client base.  The venue is likely to be at the Hilton in Ealing.  For those of you that have stayed in the Ramada in Ealing, it is the same place.  I am yet to fully formalise the agenda, but I am hoping that Mike will undertake his usual address (state of the company, current and future developments, etc.).  Hot on the heels of the roaring success in the States, I am hoping that Carl will share many of the new features that he has been working hard on for the OpenInsight 10 project.

Remember – Wednesday 25th September – If you are an OpenInsight Developer, an OpenInsight User or a MultiValue developer using D3, U2 or QM, this is one event that you’ll want to make sure that you attend.

As usual the day will be free of charge to attend, but places are likely to be limited to 25 people, so please contact me to reserve your place on this key Revelation EMEA event.

A new O4W related blog goes live

Check out David Sigafoos’ blog on his Adventures in Revelation’s O4W

Following his trip to the Revelation Conference, David has been encouraged to emerse himself in the world of O4W and I’m really pleased to note that he has decided to blog his journey for us to follow, learn and share in his achievements.

David says, “With this blog I hope to show the care and feeding of O4W from OpenInsight.  Knowledge of OpenInsight will be very helpful to follow along … and if you
are already very knowledgeable in O4W you might just pass this by.  I will be learning O4W 2.0 along the way … warts, mistakes and all.  Although I have done web page programming with PHP with connections to MySql and OpenInsight data I do not pretend to be a web designer by any means.  This will be more a how to setup and get some stuff done. Hopefully for the uninitiated and those that couldn’t get to the conference.

Please  Click Here to visit David’s blog and please subscribe to one of the RSS feeds to keep up to date with his journey.

Increasing Application Performance

Did you know…

Application performance is key to modern systems and everyone needs to achieve more, in a faster and faster timeframe and with greater efficiency.  Alot can be achieved through a system healthcheck (hardware and code reviews), the UD4.7 can be fully utilised and other things.

However,  storing frequently accessed values in memory, rather than on disk is a technique for improving your applications performance.  One useful tool is an in-memory hashtable, also known as key/value storage.  The hashtable lets you write a value to a key and read it later.  Several OpenInsight tools offer to help you hold values in memory, but each tool has strengths and weaknesses – so how do you know which tool to use in which situation.

To find out more, Click Here to review Revelation’s Technical Bulletin on OpenInsight In Memory Hashtables.

OpenInsight 9.4 Beta update

Progress on the OpenInsight version 9.4 beta is going well with some useful feedback from our testers around the world.  Revelation continue to work on the reported issues and they have just released the third beta in the cycle.  This can be downloaded from the usual beta download location if you are on the beta program.

The company hopes to have the final beta out very soon.

#RevCon13 – Final Posting

I promise that this will be the final blog entry from me with regards to this years amazing Revelation Software 2013 Conference in Nashville.

Following another mammoth O4W tutorial session with Bryan, Mike took to the stand one last time to close out the conference. The highlights of his talk included:

1. A thank you to everyone that took the time to attend this year’s conference and to those who gave the presentations. He also thanked Billy Kirsch for a very      entertaining keynote address which resulted in Revelation’s very own song – check out the conference highlight video.
2. The Mixer evening (replacing the Vendor Fair) was a great success with at least 8 laptops open and information being shared. This appears to have been a much more casual event enjoyed by all.
3. The conference included over 5 hours of O4W content and most of that being tuition based.  Mike hinted at the ‘possibility’ of some of the O4W content being published online for conference attendees or in the WORKS area.
4. OpenInsight 9.4 will be the main priority on the return to the office, as well as OI 10 and the removal of the last traces of Notes from the website. The Notes content is largely (if not completely) being replaced with O4W content.
5. Plenty of fun was had by all during the conference. This included the keynote address and the evening out. Mixed with alot of technical content and learning and this conference has proven to be another huge success and rewarding for all who attended.
6. Finally, Mike did not give a date for the next conference but asked for some feedback on the current conference and whether people would like another on in 12 or 18months time. With everyone’s training budgets being stretched and the cost of conference venues and the associated bits and pieces, Mike is looking for some guidance on timescales from those of you that hope to attend the next conference.

I think that the cat is out of the bag and, for personal reasons; I was not personally able to make it to the conference this time. However, I fully intend to be at the next one and it looks like I missed a lot of very good stuff at this year’s event. Hopefully these blog postings will have helped to underline what the Revelation Conferences are all about and I hope that you will be able to join me and the Revelation team at the next Revelation Software Conference whenever and wherever it is to be held.

Finally, I’d like to congratulate Nancy and her team on a great job, well done.

#RevCon13 – The conference draws to a close.

Well, all good things must come to an end and the same can be said for the Revelation Software 2013 World Conference.  The final technical session is done and Mike has taken the spotlight for one last time to wrapup the conference.  This will also be my final ‘planned’ blog posting with regards to this years conference.

Once again, the team at Revelation have put on an amazing show and with the help of some highly knowledgable speakers everyone will have struggled to leave Nashville without a long list of things that they want to know more about, that they want to incorporate into their solutions and those all importnant little tips and how to’s that make attending the conference all too important.

I hope that these blog postings have been of interest to those of you that could not make the conference this year and that they have tempted you to make the next conference.  I apologise to those of you that subscribe to my blog and who have not been interested and therefore bombarded with these postings this week.  You’ll be pleased to know that normal service will now resume with more occasional postings.

This posting will be edited following Mike’s closing address with a few additional details, so please check back here early next week.

The conference wrapup video can be found online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CHzrn1b4Ks&list=UUoDlRSmTk0-XyB2Ij_Mig6A&index=1

I’ll add a new blog posting touching on the content of Mike’s closing address.

 

#RevCon13 – Final Day and it’s O4W

This morning the Revelation Software 2013 conference schedule will be dedicated to the amazing (OK, I’m more that a little biased) O4W.  This easy to use web technology has proved to, yet again, be a highlight of the conference and it will feature highly on the ‘must find out more’ lists of those developers and users that have made it to Nashville for the conference.

Following on the training session earlier in the week, Bob Catalano and Bryan Shumsky will dedicate this morning’s session to Building Mobile Applications with O4W.

In this three hour training session, Bryan will build on what developers learned at the O4W Programming Practices session earlier this week and attendees will learn the specific design considerations and techniques needed to create mobile web applications using O4W.  Basic+ programming experience and familiarity with the powerful O4W APIs is recommended for this session.

With mobile applications becoming more and more important to businesses and individuals, this will be one hot, HOT, topic to close out the technciual side of this years highly educational conference.

#RevCon13 – End of Day 2

So, an action packed day two draws to a close and this evening the entertainment turns to the traditional conference dinner event.  This year, it takes place at Nashville’s famed Wild Horse Saloon, where the food is intoxicating and corporate events are…a little less corporate.

#RevCon13 – Put your data to work and Package Management

As today’s breakout sessions draw to an end there is just time for a presentation from Mary Jean Blink and Bob Cloney and they will be up against another double act, this time Andrew McAuley and Aaron Kaplan.

Put Your Data to Work
Mary Jean Blink and Bob Cloney (Elite Spice)
Any business application designer should recognise that time is one of the most costly, yet frequently overlooked, expense incurred by business.  Once the value of time is lost, it will never be recaptured.

Business data is an invaluable commodity that is collected and stored in large quantities.  However, time consuming processes are often required before data can be abstracted into relevant business information.  We are challenged to deliver the right information, to the right people, at the right time…IMMEDIATELY!!!

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Does your business or client struggle to manage multi-valued relational data and transform data into meaningful business information?
2. Have you considered how much time is lost to retrieving and processing data before truly valuable information can be presented to and analysed by your application’s users?
3. Are you concerned about the performance of your application on a network and across the cloud using O4W?
4. Do you fear using relational indexes and have you heard that you should never put a Btree index on a symbolic?

This presentation will aim to dispel the myths and put your data to work using a strategic combination of relational indexes, Btree indexes and practical user interfaces.

During the presentation, Mary Jean and Bob will present a demonstration of the methods and techniques to abstract real business data into valuable and timely business information.

Package Management in OpenInsight
Andrew McAuley and Aaron Kaplan (Sprezzatura)
Many Revelation developers have been working with OpenInsight for a good number of years and they have a wealth of tools and utilities to manage and to include in robust system deployments.

During this presentation, the Sprezzatura team will explain how package management has helped to manage their plethora of tools to create consistent deployments without accidentally reverting entities.

Package management allows for the generation of deployments ensuring that the correct software versions are always deployed.  In addition to the thorough discussion that you have come to expect from a Sprezzatura presentation, Andrew and Aaron will also be demonstrating the organisation’s in-house tool which now manages and creates all of Sprezzatura’s software distributions.

#Revcon13 – Speed Matters and ARev32

The second set of breakout sessions for today see Mike taking a second presentation for today and Stefano will be tackling a topic that is important for all software developers.

Speed Matters
Stefano Cavaglieri (Fonoteca Nazionale Svizzera)
Everyone is familiar with the benefits of speed, in particular when it comes to processing larger amounts of data, but there is more than that.

During this presentation, Stefano will give a brief explanation of the purposes and then he will dig into a number of coding techniques, all rigorously written in OpenInsight’s Basic+, aimed to perform faster.  He will step through some of the code snippets published in 2006 on International Spectrum by Mike Ruane, then he will have a closer look at some highly optimized code snippets written for solving specific issues at Fonoteca.

He will then round of this presentation by analysing some code written for various aspects of a word game.  All of the source code will be shown, executed, benchmarked, compared, and discussed.

Making the move to ARev32
Mike Ruane (Revelation)
The enduring nature of Advanced Revelation applications means that there are still countless individuals and organisations who rely on their DOS based ARev systems day in and day out.  All too often these are mission critical systems and organisations would suffer if the system was lost for more than a few short hours.

If your application is still running in ARev or RevG, you are at the mercy of Microsoft updates as to whether the next update to Windows will disable your application. Several of my clients had a real scare recently following a Windows XP update and some of those organisations hurriedly tried to back out of the upgrade when their found their ARev systems crippled.

In this session, Mike will describe the process of moving an ARev application from DOS to Arev32 and ensuring your application will be running for years to come on modern operating systems.

Whether you are at conference or just following the proceedings through my blog, Facebook, or whatever AND you are still running an ARev or RevG DOS based system, don’t leave things to chance.  Call or email me today to discuss the things that you need to be concerned about and your options going forward.

PLEASE, don’t leave it until that morning when you have no system and you enter into full on panic mode.  Many ARev systems are over 25 years old and RevG systems are even older.  Isn’t it time to consider upgrading to something a little more modern, flexible and supportable going forward?