Ask Reuben

3, 4, or 5?

What Genero version should I be developing with?

On the support desk, we are getting a number of issues relating to older versions.  Our support policy has a simple mantra, “current plus two”.  That is we support the current version plus the two previous versions (1).  At the time of writing this article (July 2024), the current version is 5.00, and the previous versions supported are 4.01 and 3.21.

As a rule of thumb, it takes us approximately five years to cycle through three release cycles, and at a minimum we would expect you to have to upgrade FGL, GAS, GRE at least once every 5±1 years in order to remain on a supported version.

We also expect that any release of your product will be with the latest release of our product.  If we release a new version of our product on January 1, then we would expect any release after say February 1 (2) to be on this latest release of our product.  You would have participated in the Early Access Program (EAP), discovered and resolved any issues, completed your QA using our latest release, and be ready to use the latest release of our product shortly after it was released.

As a result we would expect most support questions to involve the latest release of our product, but there is a sizeable proportion still where developers are asking questions involving the previous version or even earlier versions before that.


VersionRelease DateEstimated End of Support
3.1XSeptember 2017December 2024 (end of the year of release of version 5)
3.2XJune 2019December 2025 (end of the year of release of version 6)
4.0XSeptember 2021December 2026 or December 2027 (end of the year of release of version 7)
5.0XMarch 2024December 2028 or December 2029 (end of the year of release of version 8)

If you are developing using a Genero version beginning 3.2, you are using a version that will be out of support upon the release of version 6.  So as of July 2024, if we assume that version 6 will be released in 2025 which is the plan on the current roadmap, that means a Genero product with a version beginning 3.2 has a remaining supported life of 1½ years.

If you are developing using a Genero version beginning 4.0, you are using a version that will be out of support upon the release of version 7.  So as of July 2024, if we assume that version 7 will be released in 2026 which is the plan on the current roadmap, that means a Genero product with a version beginning with a 4 has a remaining supported life of 2½ years. You might take the view, given that roadmaps are only estimates and not set in stone,  that version 7 won’t make 2026, which would mean an extra year of support to give a remaining supported life of 3½ years.  Either way it is 2½-3½ years when you would be looking at a year or two longer if you were using the latest Genero 5.00.

There are some good reasons to be on the latest release.  These include…

  • access to the latest functionality
  • bug fixes
  • security
  • we make use of some third party libraries that will not be the latest version in older releases of our product
  • deployment to mobile app stores typically requires latest version
  • as a good rule of thumb, everything in your hardware and software stack should be of similar age.  We are noticing some issues where older graphics cards don’t render universal rendering without being updated.

There are some reasons not to be on the latest release but not many.

  • You rollout a new release gradually to your customer base and so will typically freeze on a particular version for the duration of your rollout.  If your rollout is going to take longer than our release cycle, you would ideally schedule in a pause to the rollout to allow you to upgrade.
  • Customers have strict formal change procedures in place, the benefit of the latest release does not exceed the cost of respecting the change procedures

So as of now in July 2024, if you are working on a product that has not been released, and you are working with a version other than version 5, you really ought to be using a Genero version 5.


Notes

(1) – support for a release will always end 31 December so “Current plus two” is really “Current plus two plus rest of year”

(2) – I’ve allowed a month to run your QA tests etc on the released version of our product after it is released