GeneXus USA: Basic Core y Advanced Core

First of all, let me say that we are excited about all the interest that the Core has generated. It was always our idea to share part of the Core, because we consider it helpful for clients to get started in working with GeneXus projects, something that strengthens our Community. With the Basic Core and the WorkWith Pattern it is easy to get a quick start on a real application. We think this is a good way to get more people involved and excited about how easy it is to build applications with GeneXus.

Having said that, there are two problems that have in a way prevented us from releasing this to the Community:

1) The basic Core is not a "product". Today there are some things that are done in a "quick & disorderly" way, like page initialization. We intend to do in a better way, but we still have not found the time to do it. Some functionalities must be there if this is to be considered a product (for example: a user interface defining rights for the different roles over the pages/menus). However, they are still not available because we haven’t had the need for them yet, and they still remain to be implemented. We could say that the Basic-Core is still to be “completed”.


2) The Basic Core is a subset of our Core. Our Core has additional modules – which we considered more specialized, and that somehow capture some of our practices on how to handle certain functionalities. But they are not as widespread as is the case with security and navigation. For instance, we are now working on adding a notification module to define events, alerts and notifications, and to allow users to subscribe to notifications, etc. All our applications resort to some kind of notifications, and we thought this was a good thing to add to our Core. Our Core also has error-codes (in order to allow end-users to customize the error messages that the system displays, and to allow them to write up the solution to the error, thus working as an online user-guide). Error codes could relate to the notification module in order to raise alerts in case an error code occurs, for example. Our idea was not to share - at least for free - the full Core but just the basic one that contains the widespread functionality.

So, up to this point, we were in a way “stuck” without a decision made... It was then that Anya wrote her article in the blog. And it turned out that there were many people interested in having the same type of Core. So we decided not to let implementation problems prevent us from attaining our final goal: sharing all this and helping to strengthen the Community. Therefore, here’s our idea:

Basic Core

We will share this on the public GeneXus Server (subject to some kind of open-source license to be defined). In order to generate the objects we used an extended version of the WW-Pattern, so we have to decide whether they will be moved to the standard one, or if we will release the extended version of the WW Pattern along with this. Regardless, it will be available for free, though we will not be maintaining it. Everyone is welcome to participate and extend it, and to collaborate, but we will not be officially supporting or updating it. Instead, we will be willing to answer support questions, to the extent that they are posed in English in a public site - preferably stackoverflow (under GXUSA-BasicCore tag).

Advanced Core

We will have the Advanced Core as a service available to subscribe to. The Advanced Core will be distributed using the propagate option, to enable customizing for later integrating our updates by using the Change Defender.

Again, this is more a service than a product, in the sense that we do not have a "fits all needs security module" or "all scenarios covered notifications module". The Core grows as we need it to, and everyone adhering to this is welcome to join in. Under the subscription mode - the support mode will be the same as the basic Core - we will use a publishing site written in English (For queries submitted in other languages, email them and we will translate from Spanish or Portuguese, but we will keep the public support in English only). In this case, the tag should be GXUSA-Core.

We will be coming with further information on this soon.

Thank you all for your interest!