Information AboutIef |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT INFORMATION ENGINEERING FACILITY | |
| software engineering | |
| data management | |
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OVERVIEW It was initially produced by Texas Instruments , with input from James Martin (author) and his consultancy firm James Martin Associates, and was based on the Information Engineering Methodology (IEM) . The first version was launched in 1987. IEF became popular among large government departments and public utilities. It initially supported a CICS/COBOL/DB2 target environment. However, it now supports a wider range of databases and operating systems. IEF was intended to shield the developer from the complexitiesof building complete multi-tier cross-platform applications. In 1995, Texas Instruments decided to change their marketing focus for the product. Part of this change included a new name - "Composer". By 1996 IEF had become a popular tool, however it was criticized by some IT professionals for being too restrictive, as well as for having a high per-workstation cost. But, it is claimed that IEF reduces development time and costs by removing complexity and allowing rapid development of large scale enterprise transaction processing systems. In 1997 Composer had another change of branding, Texas Instruments sold the Texas Instruments Software division, including the Composer rights, to Sterling Software . Sterling software changed the well known name "Information Engineering Facility" to "COOL:Gen". COOL was an acronym for "Common Object Oriented Language" - despite the fact that there was little Object Orientation in the product. Despite modest sales the product continued to survive. A number of upgrade releases were produced, including several significant improvements which allowed the generation of web pages and proxies. In 2000, Sterling Software was acquired by Computer Associates (CA). CA changed the name, for a brief period to "Jasmine", and finally to "Advantage Gen". Advantage Gen is still used widely today, although more Advantage Gen systems are now in maintenance than in development. Those which remain in development tend to focus on the its powerful back-end capabilities, leaving user-interface design for more modern tools. In 2006, it was renamed to "AllFusion® Gen" and in 2007 to "CA Gen". The latest release of the tool added support for the DATACOM DBMS and for the Linux operating system. |
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