Great LANSA Conference

If you did not make it to the LANSA conference this year, you really missed a great one. The venue was spectacular. I will post some more photos next week. LANSA always addresses my most important issues: Food, Entertainment and Education! (Yes, it is usually in that order).

I must tell you that the Education program developed this year was spectacular. A couple of the sessions that I attended that should be noted are:

SOA...David Brault was brilliant and made a very confusing subject quite clear.
WAMS Education....very well thought out (I ran out of time, but will complete at home). Not sure how many people were required to generate all of this documentation. However, I heard that Madden had a book signing.

Rumor has it that the 20th anniversary will be something very special! One popular idea is a cruise/conference. That has my vote! Hope to see you at the conference next year.

A special thanks to everyone that attended our Portlet Generator Session on Monday! If you need more information...call 513/977-4544.

Hope To See You at the LANSA Conference

We are 10 days away from the LANSA Conference in Las Vegas. I am extremely excited about the program, training sessions and of course the location. Rippe & Kingston will have a session Monday afternoon from 3:30 - 4:00 on WAMS and Portals within WebSphere as well as other portals.

It is always nice to see familiar faces and hopefully some new ones as well. This year we have three attendees: Thom Davidson, John Reuter and Kent Oldham. Be sure and say hello to them.

You still have a little time to register.

Business Continuity & Online Backup and Recovery Services

Working with LANSA and a lot of iSeries (AS/400, System i5) clients, we are frequently asked about business continuity services and the very popular use of online backup. As a result Rippe & Kingston has partnered with VAULT400. In our opinion, when it is time to seriously address your Business Continuity Needs you want a Premier Managed Service Provider...VAULT400 delivers Secure Online Backup and Recovery Services and Solutions.

If you would like to learn more and receive a free technical brief please click here.

On Demand Presentations

If you have not noticed, LANSA has been doing some pretty interesting things on their web sites. They created a seperate site for RAMP with a nice user interface. They have several product overview videos and now are preparing some On Demand Presentations. Take a look at the RAMP site when you have a minute and register for one of their webinars. This is a good time to get management thinking about their plans for the next year.

LANSA User Conference

Hope to see everyone at the LANSA User Conference in the Autumn. I have been told that LANSA is going to offer some outstanding training sessions. Great time to put a little polish on some of your "slightly" rusty skills and learn new ones.

Find out more about the 2006 International LANSA User Conference

Oct 15 - 18
Red Rock Resort, Las Vegas, Nevada
http://www.lansa.com/conference

Visual LANSA WAM Weblets

LANSA WAMs productivity increases when a developer takes existing XSL Web Page Weblets that are shipped with the Visual LANSA IDE and copy these Weblets to make custom components. A Weblet can be a number of objects. A few examples include Checkbox, Drop Down, Clickable Images, Tab Pages, Tabs, etc. The power is really increased when the Weblets are linked as a visualization to a database field. The concept of storing the visualization with the field supports centralizing your inventory of components. When the field level components are used in one or more database files, the Weblet and all the field characteristics are available to the file and any functions the field is used in without further modifications.

Visual LANSA also uses wizards in which they call application templates. These wizards will generate completed web pages that allow developers to perform business/application activities. You can copy shipped wizards or create new wizards for your specific application. When you as a developer combine the power of the wizard with the custom Weblet functionality, your development productivity increases dramatically over traditional methods.

As an example, a developer can run a wizard to create a particular function, the wizard creates the application code, screen layouts, presentation layer, screen visualizations, business logic, validation rules, error routines, etc. and the developer has not written any code!

Additional comments are welcome from other LANSA Developers.

RAMP Movie

Click here to see a good overview of RAMP. It is a short presentation of the basic concepts of RAMP and how it can help you modernize your 5250 green screen applications and extend those applications with new technology. It's worth the time to take a look.