I would have liked the first blog on this site to have been something deep and thoughtful on the subject of Code Generation and its growing place in IT provision, but that's not to be.  Instead I'm having to settle for a slightly less well thought out piece on whatever comes out as I type.  Please don't let me get blogger's block!  The boss said on Tuesday afternoon, can you get the community and support site up by Friday, which only just left me time for the mechanics and precious little left over for content.  Not enough time to buy hardware or software that's for sure, so it's been a case of make do, scouting out an underused PC, backing up and moving the data, reformatting the hard drives and installing the operating system, database, application server and community support software.  Then shlepping the whole thing upstairs to a different LAN, isolated from the development environment, and exposing it to the web.  I suppose one of the nice things about working in relatively small, developer-focused business is that you are allowed to do things like that, the disadvantage being you don't get much of a choice.

Thanks go to Jive at this point, who provide free licences for their Clearspace software for other open source sites like this.  Adding to that the MySQL community database server and Apache Tomcat, and we've a set of excellent products, all open source and free to use.  I didn't have quite enough time to shift everything over to Unix, or the whole set up would have been completely open.  Creating an open source release of JeeWiz doesn't feel quite so daring now as it did when it was suggested earlier this year.

It's an interesting exercise for someone of a certain age not just to move into the open source space, but to implement a community site to support it too.  It doesn't seem that many years ago that the social use of a company's e-mail system could get you fired, and now we are expected to take our water-cooler moments online.  We e-mail and blog and comment on forums, and if an Internet search doesn't provide the answer to all our questions, there's usually a helpful forum where others are blogging and commenting and will be only too willing to lend a hand.  Five years ago "they" were saying, be careful not to leave an online footprint, because when you go for a job they'll Google you and if they don't like what they see you won't get the job.  Now they are saying, make sure you have an online footprint, because if you're applying for a job and they can't Google you, you won't be seen as a team player.   We follow in the footsteps of journalists (how sad) as online participation is beginning to be seen as part and parcel of a career in IT.  Blogging is another one of those mental shifts we have to make as times change and we are called on to change with them: a strange melange of the personal and professional to suit the Facebook generation.  A good thing?  Quite possibly.  Time will tell, and not very much time at that.

I joined NT/e nearly five years ago, seduced by the quality and flexibility of the JeeWiz product, then out in the wild as version two point something.  Over the previous twenty years I'd seen application generation systems come and go and my opinion was always the same - more trouble than they're worth.  This was the first time I'd come across anything where I reckoned you'd get more out than you put in.  Since then we've worked on commercial transform stacks, creating full front-to-back systems in java, j2ee and c# .NET.  We've done web service applications from WSDL and web-service backbones for multi-national companies.  We've written transforms for Eclipse plugins and round tripped from IDEs to applications and back again.  We've tried our hand at 3GL to OO language transforms, automatic documentation generation, and websites.  We've built from DSL onto datagrids and generated a security system for a global company I'm not even allowed to mention. 

And now we've taken version five open source with jsf, Spring and Hibernate, and this has brought a whole new set of challenges, not least of which is how you support a product the core parts of which are free.  You are looking a part of our answer.  We'd love to create a community of JeeWiz users, both those who want to stretch the software in unexpected directions and those who just want to take the application generation stack and use it to churn out applications in half the time.  That way the next five years working with JeeWiz will be as exciting for us as the last.

Jon