Information Engineering Facility
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The IEF (Information Engineering Facility) was the first name of a full lifecycle Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tool, which has now gone through three different owners (Texas Instruments, Sterling Software and CA) and several different names (IEF, Composer by IEF, Composer, COOL:Gen, Advantage Gen, AllFusion Gen and, in 2007, CA Gen).
[edit] Overview
It was initially produced by Texas Instruments, with input from James Martin (author) and his consultancy firm James Martin Associates, and was based on the Information Engineering Methodology (IEM). The first version was launched in 1987.
IEF became popular among large government departments and public utilities. It initially supported a CICS/COBOL/DB2 target environment. However, it now supports a wider range of databases and operating systems. IEF was intended to shield the developer from the complexities of building complete multi-tier cross-platform applications.
In 1995, Texas Instruments decided to change their marketing focus for the product. Part of this change included a new name - "Composer".
By 1996 IEF had become a popular tool, however it was criticized by some IT professionals for being too restrictive, as well as for having a high per-workstation cost. But, it is claimed that IEF reduces development time and costs by removing complexity and allowing rapid development of large scale enterprise transaction processing systems.
In 1997 Composer had another change of branding, Texas Instruments sold the Texas Instruments Software division, including the Composer rights, to Sterling Software. Sterling software changed the well known name "Information Engineering Facility" to "COOL:Gen". COOL was an acronym for "Common Object Oriented Language" - despite the fact that there was little Object Orientation in the product.
Despite relatively modest new sales the product continued to earn significant maintenance revenues. A number of upgrade releases were produced, including several significant improvements which allowed the generation of web pages and proxies.
In 2000, Sterling Software was acquired by Computer Associates (now CA). CA has rebranded the product three times to date. CA Gen is still used widely today, although more CA Gen systems are now in maintenance than in development. Those which remain in development tend to focus on its powerful back-end capabilities, leaving user-interface design for more modern tools. Under CA, recent releases of the tool added support for the CA-Datacom DBMS, the Linux operating system, C# code generation and ASP.NET web clients.
There are a variety of "add-on" tools available for CA Gen, including GuardIEn - a Configuration Management and Developer Productivity Suite by IET Ltd in the UK and QAT Wizard, an interview style wizard that takes advantage of the meta model in Gen.
