WebOS 2.x and the comming phones and tabs.

All you webOS fans already know this but I want to share with the people not reading all the webOS blogs. HP released the Pre 2 in December 2010 on a limited set of operators. It includes webOS 2. But all old webOS phones have been left out of the update to webOS 2.x, until a month ago when O2 Germany got a webOS 2.1 release to deliver to customers using Pre+. But this release is not delivered over the air(OTA) as everything so far has been done. You have to download it and doctor it to your phone. What then happened is that the homebrew community have created scripts to apply this release on a number of different version of the Pre phone. It seems to work great, even for the older versions of Pre. I have not tried this my self yet. Do not have the time, especially if something does go wrong. Biggest problem when it goes wrong is your account/profile on the phone. You might loose your apps or other things. I do not have any apps since I am not on an approved operator.

What has also happened is that HP has announced 2 new phones and a pad. They will be released this summer, actually one of the phones will probably release already in April or May. If it release that early it will most likely run webOS 2.1 or maybe 2.2. webOS 3 is probably ready and a must for when they release the pad. If that is the same for Pre 3 I do not know. Pre 3 is like the earlier Pres but with better hardware and a bigger screen. So that one looks like a must have for me. So I hope it is an early summer release.

So now HP finally is coming with some new hardware. But is that enough?? NO, HP have to make the developers happy. Because without developers there will be no webOS. And I am not talking about the developers at HP making webOS. I am talking about the application developers. webOS need more apps. So what does the developers need? Most, or at least many, need to see that there is money in making apps for webOS. And with no users there is no money. What can be done to make more users? I guess one thing is to make the phones/pad available world wide with an application catalogue that is available to ALL users. At the moment you can use your Pre in many places of the world. But it is almost impossible to buy an application if you do not activate your phone in the 'correct' way and live in the countries that is supported. This really limits the sales of the applications.

Anyway, I hope developers will start making new apps, and updating old ones, NOW. Not wait for the release of webOS 3 or the new hardware. We need to get the application ecosystem growing and healthy. And we as developers need to tell HP we want global access of the application catalogue, NOW.

AR System 7.6.04 now available for download

This Monday AR System 7.6.04 was made available for the customers. And it was really needed. We have very big problems with upgrading our AR System 7.1 servers running 7.0.3 ITSM to AR System 7.6.03 and ITSM 7.6.03. There are so many bugs in 7.6.03. And the bug fix list in 7.6.04 is LONG.

BMC say you need to upgrade all components if you want to run 7.6.04. And that will not really work in this project. So little time left before go live. But now we got OK about support if we only upgrade AR System Server and Mid-Tier to 7.6.04 and leave ITSM at 7.6.03. OK, there are some bugs in ITSM 7.6.03 that need fixing to.

So far we have only tried Mid-Tier 7.6.04. And it works better then 7.6.03, at least when it comes to the cache. 7.6.03 seemed to read the whole server every time somebody logged in on Mid-Tier. But 7.6.04 only loads what is needed to perform the thing the user is trying to do. It is a lot faster.

One of the bugs we have reported on 7.6.03 is when consuming web services. If you get an error in the transaction the set field web service action result in setting the 'Short Description' field to NULL. You will not notice that if you not have error handling built on the work flow. But if you have error handling and want the record to be stored it will fail with 'Short Description' set to NULL. Did not see anything in release notes about this being fixed in 7.6.04. But it is a serious error. All of a sudden we are back in AR System 6.3 functionality.

Another bug is that if you create an new record, does not matter if it is push field, web service, import, or any other way, and you have default values that contain any $$, you will get extra characters at the end of the string. En example, if you have $USER$ as default value on 'Submitter' the resulting value will be like 'userid%s%s%s'. Not working very well if you use the submitter access functionality.

BMC have really made me disappointed with there 7.6.03 release. And I fear that 7.6.04 does not really fix the important bugs that we need fixed in 7.6.03. I hope it will not result in a rollback of this upgrade project. That would be a very big setback for AR System at this customer, and a very big cost. I wonder if BMC is ready to pay customers for total fail using 7.6.03.

Anyway, I hope BMC can solve this fast. I really want all this new stuff, except maybe layers. I would very much want to make some new super application. Not a big blob like the ITSM application.