But...no waltz?
By Carlos Zaldivar
Are you still programming primitively? - I asked a
colleague. And we extended the invitation to two other people. They were
fascinated by a simple demonstration of an application developed in just 10
minutes (of course, after we had insisted for almost a month) and the wait
started for the on-line registration of the great event of programm...(sorry)... of
description.
So on last November ninth and with a very Mexican road
traffic (slow but safe) we arrived in the hotel hosting the event, the Nikko,
and at eight o'clock sharp we took care of our registration and
breakfast.
Sergio Gazzolo, Director of ARTech Mexico, started at nine
hours and fifteen minutes sharp the welcome to all the national and foreign
Genuxians.
There were several very interesting conferences and
presentations that I would like to highlight, other that I won't mention so much
and other I missed because I couldn't divide myself in 2 (GeneXus does not
perform human cloning yet) I will just not mention.
The first slides were presented by Jesus Ortiz of the
Ministry of Economy and they showed a project of this government called
"PROSOFT". It is connected with the legislation, stimulation and optimization
for software development and marketing in the Republic of Mexico in order to be
able to compete with foreign products. One of its goals is to become leaders of
software development in Latin America. Among the indicators obtained in this
administration there was one that was not mentioned and it is the percentage of
GDP that Mexico is investing on IT, almost 8% (approximately), while the US
invests a little more than 9% of its GDP. What is interesting is that the US
investment of 9% is equivalent to almost 100% of the total Mexican GDP! That is
to say we will be leaders in Latin America and we will take a long time in
competing with the first world in IT, but it certainly can be done.
Nicolas Jodal followed with a keynote about IT, and he
talked about applications, platforms and new trends among which WEB 2.0, RSS
(which is used by almost everybody) and LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) are
outstanding, and mainly about the computational and administrative technology
used by GOOGLE (who by the way, started officially operations in Mexico
yesterday: www.google.com.mx/mexico). Google, in addition to being a powerful
search engine, offers services such as GOOGLE EARTH, SCHOLAR (a very useful and
high quality tool for us teachers),GMAIL, DESKTOP SEARCH, PICASA and TALK among
many others, and we imagine that part of its technology is stored among some 120
and 150 thousand servers! And we obtain responses in milliseconds (How long do
you take to find information in your company if you have a hundred thousand
records?) by the way Nicolas, I still have a question: What was that
Peñarol?
After the coffee break (having the seventh cup of coffee
and with my kidneys about to explode) a success story started. This year we
missed EMI Music and Mabe, because they are always ahead of the game and on this
occasion DICONSA held the stage. They are in charge of two supply programs in
all the Republic of Mexico for rural areas with difficult access.
And finally, Gerardo Pizarro took the podium and we knew
it all along that his words would be entertaining and that among laughs there
would be clear concise data, in addition to showing the powerful support that
GeneXus has had and will continue to have worldwide. After another cup of coffee
during the break, there was a great novelty: GeneXus Consulting Mexico (GCM),
who will be in charge of advising and strongly supporting clients during the
implementation process of new systems with GeneXus. Karina Santo was in charge
of the first part and after her Graciela Albornoz and Ramon Jacques continued,
approaching the GCM objective directly and giving some examples of developments
in Latin America.
I missed the GXflow conference with our dear Gerardo in
Hall B, so if somebody would like to supplement this report with what happened
"next door" please feel free.
We were behind schedule and time seemed to fly, we started
to feel hungry and the ORACLE conference was scheduled for before lunch, so the
speaker worked on bringing us up-to-date about his platform, its new versions,
about GRID COMPUTING technology and about the free ORACLE license. It seems this
speaker was hungrier than us, because he went ahead and during his talk he
swallowed all (or almost all) the "p's", such as "otion", "corrution" , etc;
anyway, these linguistic deviations are common.
When I was about to starve, we could barely make it to our
reservation in a nearby restaurant/bar and we were saved, which enable us to
attend punctually the second part of this great event. I missed IBM's keynote
but it surely was excellent quality, because on other occasions I had the chance
to listen to and enjoy the knowledge of Roberto Tellez; also the GXportal
conference with Carolina Torrado.
Sergio came again with a very interesting talk:
"Redoubling the GeneXus commitment", where he emphasized the company mission,
its scope and its global positioning. Redoubling efforts is everybody's task.
And I include my two cents here: "GeneXus in Education" Almost all universities
handle "CASE Tools" theoretically as one of their subjects and some of them
(very few I believe) handle "GeneXus" practically (the University of Anahuac,
among them) and others do not even know this "Intelligent Tool". At the
universities where I have taught the subjects of Computation and/or Programming
I have insisted (AND I SUCCEEDED) in implementing the practical side of CASE
tools with GeneXus, obviously in its trial 7.0 version, with excellent results.
One problem is the lack of half-yearly or quarterly follow-up.
So the objective, for this school year, is to train the
students of the last semester of baccalaureate with GeneXus Trial Version 8.0
and give follow-up and support this generation during their stay at the
University. The objective is that when they finish their studies they have
enough tools, not only to defend themselves, but also to propose changes and
break preset paradigms in companies, and what better way to do it than with
GeneXus!
The nth cup of coffee was in my hands and I still enjoyed
it, just like the event and the chats with people I hadn't seen since the 3rd
Meeting in 2004.
Nicolas Jodal told us about GeneXus in the short and long
term, and half through the talk we were looking forward to the arrival of the
guru (one more) of technology, Breogan Gonda, because we knew he would close
with forceful uncontestable words and with a vision that he has had in this
ending 2005.
Nicolas closed with a phrase typical of him, quite
authentic and, for some, even "amazing" (as it is hard to believe and wonderful)
that refers to one of ARTech's missions: "To be able to offer the client simple
tools and solutions that could hardly be made by hand" (more or less that was
it).
And nearing the hour twenty, all the attendees went silent
and we focused on the person of Breogan Gonda: his homily would
start.
His conference was called "GeneXus. 15 years later." How
to forget those green (and a few yellow) screens with letters and numbers
working on MS-DOS.
He told us about GeneXus evolution, its participation in
different countries, the number of customers (five thousand), the developed
applications and GeneXus future for the end of this decade, all in so few
slides. And the slide he particularly stressed was one where a simple chart on a
Cartesian axis highlights the four properties of this tool: productivity,
usability, completeness and universality. Little information and an extensive
interpretation where all of us let our imagination fly with figures.
Breogan was direct as usual and from this Wednesday on,
all we have to do is look forward to the 5th Meeting and confirm his prophecies
with GeneXus.
So GeneXus enjoys the luxury of celebrating a bit more
than fifteen years in this market. We celebrated and toasted (at the end of the
event) to these fifteen years, but... no waltz!
Thanks a lot to ARTech, to GeneXus and to all of us for
keeping the community growing all the time.
Finally, would we consider GeneXus, in addition to being a
CASE tool and an Intelligent Tool... an Artificial Intelligence tool? If it's not
now, when?
Comments: Czaldivar@cc.edu.mx
November, 2005.