SELECT Enterprise

Question

I was wondering if there was anyone out there who has used SELECT Enterprise
or Rational Rose for object modeling, etc. If so, how would you rate the
two or which one would you recommend using. Also, has anyone ever had any
training by SELECT either in just using their Tookit or OO Analysis and
Design or both? Thank you.

Answer 1

From: Stephen McHenry <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: SELECT Enterprise
Reply-to: Stephen McHenry <[email protected]>
At 08:20 AM 3/14/97 -0500, you wrote:
I was wondering if there was anyone out there who has used SELECT Enterprise
or Rational Rose for object modeling, etc. If so, how would you rate the
two or which one would you recommend using. Also, has anyone ever had any
training by SELECT either in just using their Tookit or OO Analysis and
Design or both? Thank you.I responded to your earlier question in the newsgroup (in kind of a
light-hearted way), but in light of your question above, I wanted to give a
more personalized response. I would HIGHLY recommend the Forte OOA&D course
over any OOA&D course taught by a case tool vendor, IF you are planning on
successfully deploying projects in Forte. If you just want to learn general
OOA&D, with a focus on that particular case tool, then the vendor course is
probably fine.
Why do I say this? Well, first my assumption is that your management will
not pay for you to attend two OOA&D courses. If they will, fine - take
both. If not, you are now faced with which course will help you more *for
your particular goal*, which presumably is building Forte applications. I
can definitively answer that and the answer is the Forte course.
In that course, we teach general OOA&D principles that you would learn in
the case tool vendor's course. We also spend significant time examining
many of the subtleties that many OO designers with years of experience
don't even seem to be aware of (based on their comments if they come
through our course). I have had people that have been through training by
places like Lockheed Martin (Advanced Concepts Center), Rational, etc.,
plus people that have been through case tool vendor training, plus people
that have been through hardware vendor training in OO (HP, Sun, etc.) and
uniformly they say that this course covers more OO issues in more depth
than any of the other courses they have attended. These comments only
apply, of course, to the material that both courses covered. I have no
opinion on this, as the original version of this course was created prior
to those courses existing, and I have not attended any of them. I DO,
however, look to see what is offered (table of contents) by them in an
effort to keep the course addressing relevant issues (also, sort of a
competitive analysis - I want it to be the BEST course possible), and they
don't cover any topics that we don't.
Stephen -- appreciate your response on these questions as I know you know your
stuff. Having helped Select out on some training however I think regardless of materials
some instructors likely fill in alot of gaps if it is relevant and in my case at least
make sure if they are a Forte customer they have the additional customized content that
is appropriate. Of course, there is a limitation of time as with any course.
Now, let's turn to the material that they don't both cover. The Forte
course will talk about a number of Forte specific design issues. These
topics will not be covered in a case tool vendor course because they aren't
teaching you about Forte, only about their tool. If you could find one,
another course about Forte might have the same information but, to my
knowledge, there are no other publicly available courses on Forte. These
conscept include developing three-tier architectures, load balancing, fault
tolerance, minimizing contention on shared objects, communication between
threads, race conditions, deadlocks, independent transactions, dependent
transactions, nested transactions, transactional objects, mutex and
transactional locks, forte events and event loops, translating your object
model into a relational table structure, maximizing the benefits of
polymorphism and lots more that I could talk about. Much (if not all) of
this is completely unique to building applications in a distributed
environment, and most of that is quite specific to Forte. And, these are
issues that DO make a difference as you build applications using Forte.
Unfortunately, all OOA&D courses were NOT created equal. I will venture to
say that you can't get this much in one week ANYWHERE else.
I'll get off my soapbox now. If you have any qestions, please feel free to
contact me directly.
Originally, I was going to send this as a private response, but I decided
to post it because I'm an egotistical maniac, and others might be
interested too. (Actually, the latter wasn't of much concern to me... :-)
Stephen
|======================================================================|
| Stephen McHenry Phone: [phone] x220 |
| Advanced Software Technologies |
|======================================================================|
For the rest of the group who don't know Stephen I will second the value of a class
he develops and teaches. IMO, some clients taking these other OO A&D courses,
usually oo modelling vendor-specific regsiter students where some work on Forte,
some come from the db angle for generation of ddl, some come from tools like Delphi
or PowerBuilder. In these cases they justify the other course over the Forte one
due to having only part of the audience being interested in the Forte-related aspects.