Post on GeneXus X Evolution 1 Beta1 from Enrique Almeida's blog "Desarrollando desde la trinchera" (in Spanish).It has a lot of improvements, but I focused only on trying out some of the GXServer features and the GXWiki generation (out in 3.0 version and getting better by the day).
I’m planning to try it out fully later, but for now, I want to make few quick comments about what I’ve seen so far.
1)
Performance.
Some aspects have been enhanced, it now generates and specifies in several threads, and performance seems faster.
2)
Usability.
There are some things that are still bothering me, and I’ve sent my feedback on that. Closing object tabs, for example. It drives me nuts that the cross for closing a tab is on the right, because the way I use the properties window is so that it’s automatically hidden, and every time I want to close a tab I have to make several attempts. There aren’t many things that really tick me off, but it just so happens that wasting time to close an object is one of them. It can be closed with a click on the mouse wheel, while standing in the tab, or by right-clicking and selecting close, but it doesn’t come natural to me.
3)
Team development.
GXserver. The features that allow you to create a KB by downloading data from a server, synchronize the objects you changed, and keep a record of who changed what are FANTABOULOUS. They enable team work in both a centralized and distributed way, making projects that were previously very difficult to carry out viable.
RSS Alert. All changes made in the different objects are reflected in an RSS feed. This is an old aspiration that is now made possible with GXserver. Auditors and developers rejoice!
On several opportunities I got a timeout error when I tried to synchronize with the server, even though there wasn’t much to synchronize. I also had some difficulties when the process attempted to delete objects but the objects were still being used in my KB. All these problems disappeared when I created a KB from scratch, straight from the server.
Things I’d Add. Security / authentication / encrypting in the communication with the server, so that you can control who can connect to the server. It is essential to be able to limit the people that participate in a working team and have access to a KB.
Setup Scripts.
Several things have to be done in the GXWiki to correctly compile the KB, including installing User Controls, setting properties (Theme and Master Pages), unzipping a file (MD5) in the application directory, etc.
I think that there should be a way to automate all these steps, with MSBuild tasks, and have something like a BuildAll.AutoExec.CMD, where all these tasks are executed in a more automatic way. Generically, we should have an Event.Autoexec.CMD for all the events required, for example, Sync, Import, Export, Reorg, Build, BuildAll, Compile, Specify, Deploy, GenHelp, etc., making it possible to automate some of the current tasks. What I would like to see is for these lists of commands to be put into objects in the KB and for the commands to be executed. *
Importing KB properties.I couldn’t find a way to export/import properties from a KB and its datastores.
Things I Didn’t Try. Profiler/Debug. I tried this once but couldn’t get it to work. But I’ll get there, because these are key features.
Change defender (I didn’t have time).
Windows Applications (I’d tried this already and it hadn’t worked very well, but I’m sure it’s improved).
Conclusions
Overall, I liked it. As with any beta version, there are some things that need to be improved, like, for example, the fact that at times it consumes resources (10% of my CPU) without actually doing anything and after several hours that my computer’s been inactive, having already finished indexing everything it had to index. It froze a couple of times, but nothing major.
There’s always the possibility that someone will come along and make "a virus," as always happens when you have things executing "automatically," but that’s a risk we can handle.
* Posted by Enrique Almeida in his blog “Desarrollando desde la trinchera.”