U2UG Elections 2010 – Request For Comment

To the nominees in the U2UG Election, as well as the incoming President,

Let me first state that I’m extremely appreciative of the time and effort that the members of the U2UG Board have and are putting in for the benefit of the community. For a community to be sustained and grow, the community needs leaders to give it direction, to foster innovation and to support facilities that enable the community to learn, share and interact.

Without a community of active developers and product champions, a development stack will stagnate, no new solutions will emerge and hence employment opportunities for those skilled in the stack will eventually diminish.

So it makes sense that when we have the privilege of voting for community leaders, an educated decision based not only upon their credentials, but the direction they aspire to lead the community in, that we should make the most of out.

For these reasons I have a few questions for the two gentleman who have nominated for Vice President (Charles Barouch & David Jordan). Understanding the incoming President’s (Laura Hirsh) thoughts on these questions would be also be beneficial.

• What do you see as the most important role of the U2UG?
• How do you see the “International User Group” supporting existing local user groups and helping establish new local user groups?
• What specifically do you think will increase the active member-base of the U2UG and how do you intend to monitor this?
• What do you think can be done to attract new developers & ISVs to U2 and where do you see the role of the U2UG in this?
• What do you hope to achieve by the end of this term if you are elected and how do you see it benefiting the community? How will you measure your success in this?

I understand this is a lot of questions to answer in the short time before the voting closes, but your answers will us understand vote exactly we are voting for.

Regards,
Dan

PS: Should the two nominating for ‘Member at Large’ wish to answer, their thoughts would be greatly appreciated as well.

New Developer Zone – U2 PHP PDO Driver

Rocket U2 Developer Zone

 

I spent last week at the U2 University in Sydney and had a great time. During the opening keynote speech, Rocket announced the new U2 Developer Zone.

Great news! Finally a public site for developers that links all the resources you would expect. White papers, podcasts, demos, links to manuals, personal editions of the database servers. Not just a public site, but a public site for developers from Rocket itself. That’s what we needed, strong, visible vendor support of the development community.

It is still a bit rough with a fair amount of content missing, but it has enough in there to make it worth signing up (free) to check it out.

It breaks the site down into 4 key areas.

• Ignite
• Launch
• Accelerate
• Dock

Ignite is aimed at new players and features explanations of what Multi-Value Databases are, some information about U2 as well as summaries of the Developer & Admin tools available for download.

Launch works on getting a developer up and running as quickly as possible with instructions and links for downloading and installing both the UniVerse/UniData servers, as well as their 4GL tool – SB/XA. A bonus is some professional looking video tutorials for getting them up and running.

Accelerate is focused more on in-depth content of the system with various articles and tutorials that have been produced by Rocket as well as some community figures as well.

Dock appears to be aimed at the forming a community/developer collaboration. It has links to U2UG as well as Rocket U2 on Facebook and Twitter (even though the twitter link is missing on the site at the moment). It also has a message board, but this appears to be one of those unfinished features for the time being.

One point of disappointment at the moment is ‘The Wall’ it throws up to get any content. It requires you to sign-up and log in before you can actually access the content. While I can appreciate their probable reasonings for this and appreciate it is still free, I believe this is one of those things that will prevent those who stop by from search results/ideal curiosity from actually getting involved.

By throwing up a wall, instead of openly allowing read-only access, it has a 2 fold effect. First, google (and other search engines) will not be able to correctly index the content. In an age where > 90% of website traffic generally comes from search engines, this is definitely not ideal. The other negative effect is that the bounce rate of people not currently involved will surely be higher.

Hopefully they will review this decision and decided upon a more open and effective path.

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U2 PHP PDO Driver

 

So, my title indicated something about a U2 PHP PDO Driver and you were not mislead. While at the U2U Conference I had the pleasure of, among others, speaking with Jackie from Rocket Software. At one point the conversation turned towards dynamic languages and in particular, PHP. I was told that some tutorials had actually been written on getting PHP to natively connect to U2 and should be able to be found on the new developer site. Bingo!

After some quick searching on the site, I present you 2 links so you can build your own native connector between PHP and U2:

• Building the PDO Driver – Tutorial + Source code
• Using your new U2 PHP PDO Driver – Tutorial + downloadable example

Hopefully you find this useful!