From Where I Sit: A Spring Well Sprung

By Larry Eiss

A lot of new things have happened since the last issue. A scant two weeks after I penned the last column my first grandchild was born. The young fellow weighed in at eight pounds, seven ounces. As some of you can attest, it is an amazing thing when your kids have kids.

Spring sprung well too. In fact, the more I think about it, the more apropos the words of that statement seem as a description of what happened. It seems like it has rained every day since March 1 around here. Streams are full, springs have sprung up where I have never seen them before, and my well is having no trouble keeping up with demand – most definitely a spring well sprung.

During the few dry times we’ve had, my wife and I have cut grass. From our perch on lawn tractors we have seen many of the new things this spring has brought:

	A pair of Canada Geese nested near the pond and hatched out five goslings. We watched them on one of their first forays into the world.
	The red fox family added five pups this year as well, one for each gosling as it appears. So much for forays into the world.
	The deer added fawns, and two of them romp and play on our lawn under the watchful care of their mother.
	Young groundhogs too have ventured out.
	An olive-sided flycatcher nested above the light near my front door. The egg from which her baby hatched is no larger than your little fingernail.
	The muskrats are hard at work undermining my lawn to create homes for themselves that become sinkholes for me.
	Just last night I returned home to the news that a large snapping turtle was laying eggs behind my shop. She was still there hard at work when I left this morning. She’ll lay between 60 and 110 eggs and, depending on the weather, we’ll see the hatchlings later this year or next spring.

Here at Information Builders, there are plenty of new things popping up as well. When WebFOCUS Developer Studio Release 5 was made available, it contained nearly 150 new features. That’s a lot to assimilate.

When reading the product documentation, some people come away with the impression that a Web server must be installed on the PC where Developer Studio is running. This is not the case. It’s true that a Web server is required if application development must be done without the benefit of a connection to the WebFOCUS environment on your network, but Developer Studio can be installed another way as well – I call it “Thin DevStudio.”

Thin DevStudio places only the Developer Studio GUI on the local PC. The Web server, Web Application Server, and WebFOCUS Reporting Server reside somewhere else. This provides distinct benefits. For example, a team of developers can work on a Project on a remote computer and use version control software to manage the source code and other application components.

Another new thing is the Managed Reporting Developer Edition of Developer Studio. This edition provides functionality like the browser-based Domain Administrator has. It’s great for developing Managed Reporting applications because it removes the Projects from view and lets developers work exclusively in the User Administration Services repository.

More changes are on the horizon, and I’ll discuss some of them in coming columns. Rain or shine, from where I sit, new is great. Now where did I leave that rocking-horse pattern?