CA Plex WebClient Gets a Service Pack

March 3, 2009 Alex Woodie

Partners ADC Austin and Websydian last month shipped the first service pack for a jointly developed Web 2.0-style interface for CA‘s 4GL for System i and Windows, CA Plex. Service pack 1 brings various features, including Unicode support, new AJAX templates, and a Wiki-based developer portal.

ADC Austin and Websydian have been providing expert training and add-on products for the CA Plex and CA 2E advanced application development frameworks for many years. Over the last couple of years, the two partners have been working on a new Web product that allows Plex customers to deploy their client-server applications to the Web without much additional development work.

The product, called WebClient for CA Plex, shipped at version 1.4 last summer. Now, the companies have further enhanced the product with version 1.4 Service Pack 1, which brings a host of improvements.

One of the new features, Unicode character support, enables the product to display Web pages in other character sets and languages, including Japanese and Chinese. Takaya, a CA business partner based in Tokyo, Japan, is looking forward to utilizing this feature.

“We have been working with WebClient since version 1.4, and we are pleased with the additional language capabilities provided by 1.4SP1,” says Kimiko Sakai, chief of the business software division for Takaya. “Full Japanese language support is critical to the enterprise customer in our market.”

The new release also brings “deep linking” support, which is a way to call a WebClient application and CA Plex functions from external application via XML. The service pack also brings enhancements to Web Client’s AJAX controls, including improvements to the screen templates, scripts, and interfaces, and new AJAX templates for utilizing CA Plex control features, such as child panels.

Lastly, ADC Austin, which is based in Texas, and Websydian, a Danish company, have worked to unfold www.webclientiplus.com, a new developer portal where customers can view product documentation and access other resources for WebClient, as well as MKS/CM Connector for CA Plex, a change management tool co-developed with MKS (although there is currently no content for the MKS tool).