Ask Reuben
Quiz
What resources are available to Genero developers?
As a lead Genero developer what should I know?
What don’t I know?
As part of looking after my customers in my region, I do an annual survey getting them to tell me what versions of Genero they use, what functionality they use etc. I like to think I have a good idea but we tend to only get contacted when you run into issues. This year I asked the following question … What Genero Developer resources have you used in the past 12 months? and I then followed it up with What Genero Developer resources (if any) are you unaware of? I used the same options for both questions and they were as follows … (*) I didn’t have these options listed this year but will next year. The ideal answer is that a respondent would tick that they have used most of these resources, and would not tick any boxes in response to the second question about what they are unaware of. I challenge you to look through those options and make sure you are aware of these resources. If there is a resource you are unaware of, below is a quick summary that you can use as a starting point to educate yourself or seek further information on from your local support centre. Often there is also an Ask-Reuben article that will give a little more detail about that developer resource. If you want a more comprehensive summary of things we expect senior Genero developers to be aware of, then I would encourage you to also have a look at this Quiz I had at the end of a WWDC. It is a fun way to test your knowledge of all things Genero and to expose any gaps in your knowledge. You don’t know what you don’t know. Again if there is something you’d like to know more about from the Quiz, contact your local support. Supported Systems Documentation can be found on both our Products Download page and our Documentation Download page. I had an earlier Ask-Reuben article on our Supported Systems Documentation, where to find it, how to interpret it etc. The Issue Tracker can be found on our website here and can be used to look at outstanding issues and issues fixed in releases. There is an Ask-Reuben article on how to get the most out of it. Support Requests should be going through our support portal. I did have an Ask-Reuben article on Portal etiquette and in that article I also have some links to a presentation Lionel did at the 2020 WWDC titled “Dealing with Support”. I can’t speak for all regions but normally when I am face to face with a customer I will mention the support portal and what works well and what doesn’t with their raising of cases via the support portal. Four Js does host a developer forum . It has two purposes, one for us to communicate with all Genero developers. Hence you will see announcements in the forum about maintenance releases etc. The second is it allows Genero developers to communicate with one another and share ideas. It is not intended to be a place where support questions are answered. We try to avoid answering support questions and I try and avoid responding in the first 24 hours unless … If you are reading this, you know about these Ask-Reuben articles. The Self Paced Training Portal is the intended destination where we would expect most Genero developers to goto learn at their own pace. If you have not already, register for the portal and look at the courses offered. If you would like to know a little more about it, Scott Barney, our Training and Documentation Manager did a presentation at WWDC20 when it was first introduced and we had some smaller classes for you to give it a go. I’d particularly recommend the class on the use of the fglsvgcanvas Web Component as a good one to look at and see how the Self Paced Training Portal functions whilst at the same time learning something interesting. Documentation can be found here, either as online links or as documents to download if you want to maintain an offline copy, as well as being bundled with Genero Studio. I did do an Ask-Reuben article that covers a little bit more about our documentation. As I said in that article, it is always an interesting exercise asking a Genero developer a question and watching how they go about navigating our documentation. It tells me how often they use it. There is an easy to remember URL https://4js.com/wwdc/ for past WorldWide Developer Conferences where you can go back and search and review past presentations. We do have Online Videos available here. Long term the Self-Paced Training Portal is seen as the better platform to meet our education requirements. If you do look at at an online video, just check the date it was recorded first. Four Js has a Professional Services team. From their link on the website you can find out more about the range of services they offer and how to contact them. On the Four Js news pages such as the Product News page there is an RSS symbol. You can use that or other tools to alert you about changes in web pages. For releases, we will normally have a forum post as well, but using an RSS feed on these pages is another way you can keep informed about what we are doing. On LinkedIn there is a Genero Community page at the following URL https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4105129/ Prior to release we will run Early Access Programs. I had an article on them here which coincided with the 4.00 Early Access Program which ran for 6 months prior to the release of 4.00. If Genero is important for your business then I would encourage you to participate in them. If you upgrade to a newer version of Genero a year or more after its release, and there is a change that negatively impacts you, it is often too late to go back. Four Js has two GitHub repositories where you can download code examples, libraries, tools etc https://github.com/FourjsGenero is the main repository We also have https://github.com/FourjsGenero-Cordova-Plugins which as the name suggests is used for Cordova Plugins that you can incorporate in your Genero Mobile applications. I have done a presentation on the repositories in the past at WWDC19 and at WWDC21 (Update: Shortly after this article, I added an Ask-Reuben on GitHub repositories) Shipped with the FGL package is a series of programs located in the $FGLDIR/demo directory. I did an article here outlining some of the key demo programs I run from time to time to check behaviour. I’d expect senior developer to be able run these, particularly the Widgets and Lists example and be able to tweak them to check behaviour. Often they are good program to look at when you want to double check behaviour and identify if the problem is code at your end or at our end. If the problem also occurs with the demo then that often saves you creating a minimal reproducible example. In the Genero Studio Welcome Page, there is a tab Tutorials & Samples that has more sample programs that you can run from within Genero Studio.
Supported Systems Documentation
Issue Tracker
Support Portal
Developer Forum
Ask Reuben Article
Self Paced Training Portal
Online Documentation
WWDC Archive
Online Video
Professional Services
RSS Feed for Four Js Website Changes
Genero Community LinkedIn Page
Early Access Programs
GitHub Repositories
$FGLDIR/demo
Tutorials and Samples