CA Gen Review

The most valuable feature is the faster time to deliver a product than tradition COBOL programming. We use CA Gen pretty much for everything, including data modeling, moving the code to production, and as a migration tool. We use all of the CA Gen features. We can write a mainframe application, GUI applications, everything.

We're able to have faster delivery and quickly develop a product with higher quality.

I’m very comfortable with the product, but there’s always room for improvement. The alternative is writing in a native language or program, and this is much better. We can write for mainframe applications – we write in CA Gen but generate the code in COBOL, for example. If I look into the native COBOL language it can be more efficient, and CA Gen adds what seems to be some unnecessary lines of code; it’s not an apples to apples comparison.

Very stable. We’ve had it in production for quite a long time.

It’s OK. The thing is, there are only certain limited customers for CA Gen – it’s not Java like something every developer might know. We're kind of a small group so we don’t scale traditionally.

It was already in production when I joined.

Understand what you want to do with it, be it data modeling, or creating a table structure for DB2 or whatever kind of database they want – in the IDE. If you’re writing a simple barebones COBOL program, it may take 20-30 hours, but with a solution like this it can be done in around four hours. If they have complex goals a solution like this is also very useful.