AR-System 7.5 - What's new?

To increase the excitement in the project I want us to install the latest version of ARS in the server, mid tier, clients and why not exchange the whole ITSM with version 7.5! Yeeaahh! Here we go! :D


ARS developers x-mas:

• BMC Remedy Developer Studio. I haven't seen this yet but I have heard a little about what it can be and I want to say: Finally some improvements for us developers! I have also heard that it now can be possible to use Linux instead of this hated Windows for a development platform. I hope it is true. There is also a possibility to search for object, which is great when you have hundreds thousands to manage.

• Workflow debugger! Yeah! Finally!

• Version control. You can lock objects for others when you modify them and you can get a log of every change of an object.

• Application-Set-Filter-Phasing is a new run process command for delaying inserts of entries into a form so that they can be inserted in bulk for greater efficiency.

• Dynamic join of multiple forms on runtime using API call ARGetListEntryWithMultiSchemaFields. With this you can create recursive queries, value-set queries or joins with vendor form data in an external database.

• Run process command line can handle 4096 characters instead of 256.

• ARGetCacheEvent API call can be used to monitor if changes have been done in the workflow or not. Can be useful... we'll see...

• It is now possible to join external data sources with internal AR System forms.

• Possible to log to forms instead of to files and then put workflow to filter out what you are really interested in. This can be useful...

• A new log file for measuring mid-tier performance.

• 64 bit AR servers for UNIX and Linux using a 64 bit database.

• Image server object. This is "a place" where to store images in the AR Server. Then references to these images are used when building applications instead of a lot of copies of the same image. It is common to have images on buttons to give them a nicer look and a common feel throughout the application suite. It is a bit strange that they didn't implement this earlier.

• Remedy Import tool is dead, long live Remedy data import tool! The old tool needed an upgrade so we will see later how much better this all brand new tool is.

• arimportcmd is dead, long live "a Java data import command-line utility". Hmm.. why?

User impressions, or details that makes the ARS developer cool:

• Auto completion in fields that have a menu attached.

• Tooltips which is small messages that are shown when holding the mouse over some field or data. There is a HOVER event that can trigger active links. This sounds quite powerful and can be very useful to create user friendly interfaces.

• File system browser character field. A new display type for the character field. With this you can search for a file in the network and save the file name in a field but not save the file. I can see its use but it is very limited.

• Cell-based tables. Display the whole data row with several columns in one cell instead of several. Yes we can make more beautiful designs with this.

• Possibility to remove the (clear) value from drop-down lists. Our customer will be so happy!

• Panels! These sounds great... replaces the page holders and in many cases the trim box. These will probably make my life as a user interface designer much easier!

• The panels in the panel holder can have tabs like the old page holder, collapsible/stacked (not really sure what that is), splitter which lets you see all panels and drag to resize them, accordion which sounds a lot like the old tabs but but a bit cooler.

• The panels can have solid or gradient colours, background images, rounded corners.

• Possible to expand or collapse panels with workflow.

• Possible to trigger workflow on when a panel expand or collapse.

• Text formatting templates in HTML to be used by workflow with tooltips or viewfields.

• Buttons and URLs inside a table field.

• Possibility to use PNG or GIF images and use the transparency effect.

• Yahoo User Interlace Library, a collection of libraries in JavaScript™. With this library we get the possibility of animated highlight effects of fields using workflow.

• Quick reports in the browser, saved per server, per form and per user.

• Flashboards are using Adobe flash technology.

• There will be a countdown clock in the browser telling an inactive user how much time there is until his license is expired. Do we really need this? Can I turn it off?

• If you close the web browser or navigate away from the mid-tier, the license will be released after a configurable delay timer has expired. I hope this time can be set really really short, because we see this will be a problem today in earlier versions.

You can read more details here about BMC Remedy Action Request System 7.5.0.

BMC Remedy Action Request System 7.5.0

Here it is! In the middle of our project to implement version 7.1.0 of BMC Remedy AR-System and here version 7.5.0 is released. I can not believe that we will jump on the 7.5-wagon this late in the implementation project. But I wish we would... I really do... That would be exciting... in many interesting ways... :P

I will soon dig into the documentation and see what is new about this release. :)

Useful Emacs tricks

Slashdot just posted a question about their readers favorite tricks, macros, extensions, and techniques for Emacs. I bet you can find a lot of golden tips all in one page. The information in the comments will grow fast now. Join the fun! Hopefully someone will collect all this knowledge and put it online.

2 hours of panic

Just after most of my colleagues left work for the day our production ARS server stopped working. It is impossible to access the system in any way. I check the error-log and find that the service crashed five times in a row. Then my connection to the machine totally freezes and I can not even read the log. Still no access to the AR-System.

Panic!

I call the server maintenance (SM) and ask if they notice the problem. They say they do and that they have informed the helpdesk. I explain what I experienced and ask if there are any planned changes that are supposed to get implemented this evening or any other known activities. No there were nothing. It was getting more scary and it started to point at there was something terrible wrong with our system. Good that Girlwing is at a course tonight so it doesn't matter if I work late...

The server suddenly comes alive again and the SM-guy logs in and tries to checks the server information. The server freezes again and nothing can be done. We keep talking about what can be the problem and I am start having awake nightmares about evil viruses.

When the system was responsive I searched for all the information I could find about imports and reports and nothing was supposed to run at this hour. So I was starting to rule out heavy load on the ARS service. I relax and the system got unresponsive again...

A couple of minutes later it is again possible to do simple searches in the ARS and soon the Windows OS is workable again. The CM-guy continue to check the server information. The CPU is running 100% and the memory is all eaten by a bunch of cscript processes. Then everything freezes again... it keep doing like this all the time while we are talking about the incident and searching for the cause.

Then suddenly after two hours of hard work he say... "The system hangs every time I relate those incidents with each others".

I am silent for a couple of seconds... then I say... "So if you stop relating incidents with each others, the system will work well and helpdesk will be able to access the incident application?".

He agrees to wait a couple of hours to continue and I rest my case...

...

The thing that had happened was that some computer had been switched off before the monitoring had been taken off and hundreds of incidents had been automatically generated and send to SM and filled their support group basket. There is a lot of work to manually close each incident because you have to fill in closure code and cause description. But instead it is possible to select a lot of incidents and mark them as related to a parent incident and then close the parent incident and the related ones will get closed automatically. This is a smart feature!

The problem with this is that there is a poorly written filter that executes on every save/modification of an incidents and runs a windows server process of cscript to build an XML-file. Microsoft is not well known for its efficient small footprint applications. So when the SM-guy modifies 50 incidents at the same time there will be 50 cscript processes running at the server and consuming all the available memory including some virtual memory on disk. And I can only guess what will happen when 50 identical cscript processes tries to update the same XML-file at the same time. You will probably get a lot of waiting... and helpdesk personnel that can not do it's work.

God starts to blog

My god starts to blog. Who is my god you might ask? My god is Linus Torvalds, the creator and current coordinator of the Linux project. Gods are creators of worlds and universes. Linus Torvalds created the Linux universe.

Anyway... Linus just started to blog and he often have very strong opinions about subjects relating to Linux and operating systems and this blog will cover other topics that is not directly related to the Linux project. As I understand the blog was first meant to be a family-blog but already Linus start by writing about totally different topics. I will be a reader of the blog. Gods words are true wisdom. :)