Time to hear how the Early Access program is going for xCP 2.0. Kenwood Tsai is going to talk about the program and have several participants, including Erin Riley from Beach Street, speak on their experiences. It is still 6 months from release but I’ve heard positive things so far so I am curious to hear what is being said.

Notes

• xCP 2.0 is being designed to be future ready and align with NGIS so apps created in xCP 2.0 will be able to move to NGIS
• xCP 2.0 Architecture Principles
  • Open: Open and standard technologies
  • Performance: Fast user interface, High volume
  • Unified Tooling: Single environment to build apps
  • Cloud Ready: Embrace VMware for private cloud, vitualized infrostructure and application deployment
  • Future Ready: Ready for NGIS, Abstract-away dependencies on Documentum platform
• Just said xCP 2.0 in Q3. (Heard elsewhere limited release in Q3, GA in Q4. All seems very firm.)
• Live debugging will be xCP 2.1 in order to build into unified tool
• Key Innovations
  • Stateless processes – generated services for app behavior and GUI
    • RESTful services auto-generated
    • UI data service that can be called from UI, Events, and Integrations
    • Wired to any UI Widget including charts
  • Unified expressions (and entire data model) and context data models
  • One-click app deployment from xCP Builder. Uses xMS. Called a recipe. Abstracted driver and data connection at deployment so app doesn’t change between development, test, and production.
  • Inject HTML and JavaScript directly into UI
  • xCP 1.x had 3 different expression models, dependent on component. Single model in 2.0
    • Core part of semantic application model
    • Unified data model shown in context
  • xMS supports both full and incremental deployments
  • xMS will deploy war, dar, and config elements
  • Now moving to early adopters/partners (beta testing essentially, only adding typing things). All had 3 weeks
  • Erin Riley of Beach Street (consulting partner)
    • Abstraction of data model into objects with more relationships
    • Dashboards can be on same page as task list, can collapse items
    • Real-time updating in application, no restarts (if I heard correctly)
    • Fine control of UI using HTML in widgets
    • No more adapters for stateless processes, can define inputs and outputs and map them to widgets on your page, allows for complex automated decision steps
    • Result lists are very dynamic
    • Is a pre-release, not bug free (release is months out)
  • Will Moore (sp?) of TriTek (consulting and packaged solutions)
    • Ported one of their packaged, certified solutions to xCP 2.0
    • Not incremental, more like a new product. Very different than 1.0
    • New Process Templates are unavoidable.
    • Structured Data Types are gone. Is good but makes migration an issue. Business Objects are more powerful and better
    • ExtJS and Spring help with agile solution delivery
    • No DFC equivalent, business objects instead
    • Key take-aways
      • Hard to go back to xCP 1.0 after using 2.0. Makes you realize the pain
      • DFC apps unchanged except for Structured Data Type attributes
      • All artifacts centralized into builder
      • Build/Deploy/Run much easier. All from the tool

Now off to Rick Devenuti’s keynotes, getting caffeine on way. There are supposed to be some announcements. The overall strategy is also expected to be consistent with last year which would be nice.

Disclaimer

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but may not be otherwise indicated.

All statements about the future of EMC products and strategy are subject to change at any time due to a large variety of factors.