This site is the home for the duick.com Advantage Gen Peer Support Mailing List and acts as a springboard to other Advantage™ Gen / COOL:Gen™ / Composer / IEF related resources.

These pages are dedicated to discussion and peer-support of the Advantage™ Gen / COOL:Gen CASE tool developed & distributed by Computer Associates. This site has no connection with, and is not supported by, Computer Associates.

The site is run by David Doyle, who was among the first 50 people in the world to become 'Certified COOL'. David has been using Gen since the days when it ran on MS-Dos and EGA displays. Back then, the product was owned by Texas Instruments and was known as Information Engineering Facility (IEF) before being renamed to Composer by IEF and then Composer. When purchased by Sterling Software, it was renamed to COOL:Gen as part of their COOL developer suite. Sterling Software was then acquired by Computer Associates. In early 2002 Computer Associates renamed the product as Advantage™ Gen.

Gen has changed quite a bit since the early days. While providing model-based support for the full software life cycle is still its major strength, nowadays it can be used in conjunction with Java & COM Proxies for corporate Internet/intranet development. Component Based Development is another area it is being used in with some success, with teams of developers working together to provide re-usable 'building blocks' of code to support the enterprise.