CA Plex r6 Enables Model-Driven Development Of .Net, J2EE And IBM System i Web Services

CA (NYSE: CA) today announced the availability of CA Plex r6, a state-of-the-art rapid application development environment that uniquely enables model-driven development of .NET, J2EE and IBM System i Web services.

By empowering developers to effectively apply data modeling to Web services across multiple platforms, CA Plex r6 helps IT organizations quickly deliver sophisticated and highly manageable SOA-based business solutions.

Just as important, because it also supports traditional client/server and legacy architectures, CA Plex provides a unified environment for leveraging objects across all enterprise applications. This gives customers the ability to take advantage of new service-oriented technologies while extending the useful life of existing applications.

“Successive generations of new technology often result in counter-productive fragmentation of application development efforts across the enterprise,” said William Hunt, senior product manager at CA. “By unifying and simplifying model-based development for new and traditional architectures, CA Plex r6 enables IT organizations to improve their productivity and take advantage of synergies between diverse applications.”

With CA Plex r6, Web services can be managed as “first-class” objects. Developers can view, diagram, document, and manage these objects just as they do others in their enterprise model. This enables the re-use, inheritance and other attributes to Web services that developers require to achieve the efficiency, consistency, and reliability necessary to fulfill today’s demanding business requirements within increasingly tight development resource constraints.

CA Plex r6 adds a code generator for C# to its existing code generators for Java, C++, RPG III and RPG IV. Based on the .NET 2.0 Framework, the C# generator utilizes OLE-DB to support access to all market-leading databases. It provides rich interoperability between .NET, Java and System i applications as well as with .NET applications developed with Microsoft Visual Studio.

Also new in CA Plex r6 is the ability to model and deploy applications as Java JAR files and .NET assemblies through a new build environment that exploits Apache ANT and MSBuild.

CA Plex r6 facilitates the use of “patterns”—business objects that provide solutions to many of the recurring problems that arise in development—to further improve application development. CA Plex includes hundreds of pre-designed and pre-tested patterns that are grouped into libraries. These patterns can be encoded and reused via an object-oriented inheritance engine. Any changes to a pattern are immediately applied to all instances throughout the design model.

CCH, a Wolters Kluwer business and a leading provider of tax, accounting and audit solutions (salestax.com) relied on CA Plex as the primary tool to build its CertiTAX and ZipSales Returns solutions.

“The productivity gains and cost savings that CA Plex r6 has delivered for us have been outstanding,” said Victor Herr, development manager for CCH. “With CA Plex, we were able to leverage existing client/server and System i-based skill sets to deliver award-winning solutions with next-generation Web services. We have such confidence in CA Plex that we used the beta version of r6 to build our next generation sales tax application which we plan to launch later this fall.”

CA today also named ADC Austin—an IBM iSeries and Microsoft-focused systems integration, software, and i5 platform modernization/migration firm—as a primary reseller for CA Plex. ADC Austin joins an extensive network of authorized resellers, service providers, education providers and technology partners providing pattern libraries that extend the capability of the CA Plex environment. ADC Austin is providing professional services and education for CA Plex-as well as migration patterns that enable CA 2E customers to upgrade their application development environments to take full advantage of CA Plex’s multi-platform and SOA-enabling capabilities.

“CA Plex is a powerful solution for streamlining application development and ensuring the long-term value of current development investments,” said John Rhodes, technical director and principal at ADC Austin. “We appreciate the confidence CA has shown in us by making us their partner in extending this exciting technology, and we are committed to demonstrating that this confidence is well deserved.”

The third annual CA Plex/2E Worldwide Users Event will be held Sept. 19-21 in Cincinnati. The event will feature free technical training opportunities along with business and technical sessions from CA, partners, vendors and end users. For more information, please visit http://ca.com/us/events/item.aspx?e=143087&eis=1.