Welcome!

Welcome to my weblog, and welcome at our new website: www.gxdeveloperweb.com. This website is one of the visual results of our strategy as a company to be even more open and agile to our stakeholders, in this case primarily developers. What can you expect of us on this website?

Open Communication from GX to you
We want GX DeveloperWeb to be our primary communication platform to our developers. To do that we provide:

• WebManager Community Edition. A fully functional Community Edition downloadable for free. We are still working out the details of how you use it, and for what purposes (licensing/legal stuff), but the general idea is that you can use it for small or personal websites for free, and for development purposes of course.
• Product Documentation. We are placing all our documentation online, for free of course.
• Weblogs. To interact with you, and give you insights in how we as a team work and think, several GX employees started weblogs on this website, including myself.
• Whitepapers. Whitepapers are a good way to give more detailed, in-depth information about how we think about specific topics.  

Open Development    
To be as open as possible, we practice Open Development. Comparable to Open Source development, we open up all tools our Product Development unit is using, like:

• Jira. For product development, we use Jira exclusively for issue tracking and project management, and it’s open for everyone to see how we are doing with our bug fix and maintenance process. So if you are running an important project based on WebManager, you will now be able to track and trace your bug fix request easily
• Bamboo output. This is not on DeveloperWeb yet, still on the internal network, but we will provide Bamboo output (continuous build and integration) on DeveloperWeb soon, so you can see how we are doing on quality maintenance.

We are also looking for ways to provide parts or the whole source code base of our products, to make it easier for you to check how things work internally. This isn’t on yet, and depends on legal issues we still have to work out.

Facilitate Communication among peers

• Wiki. We already use Confluence, the leading wiki software from Atlassian, as our internal wiki, this wiki will be used only for internal processes and customer information. We now have an external Wiki, which you can use, but GX will use as well.
• Forum. We provide a forum to interact with other developers, and we will contribute and use the forums ourselves, to communicate with each other.

We try to provide as much information without even registering, to make it as easy as possible to download stuff, but also to link to it from weblogs, emails or other. The easier you get to our software, the better.

I will be using this weblog to talk more about our strategy, but also about why we have chosen a particular technology, architecture or solution. As I am heavily interested in trends in the IT market, especially in the Java world, I will probably post about that now and then too. I will try to be as open as possible, although I do have a lot of customer interaction which I obviously cannot share to the public, not in specifics.

I hope you all enjoy of our new initiative. Please give feedback in the forums if you expect something else, see errors somewhere or have other comments, we really appreciate that!