CA Gen is a Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) application development environment marketed by CA Technologies. Gen was previously known as IEF (Information Engineering Facilty), Composer by IEF, Composer, COOL:Gen, Advantage:Gen and AllFusion Gen.
The toolset originally supported the Information Engineering methodology developed by Clive Finkelstein, James Martin and others in the early 1980s (See CA Gen History). Early versions supported IBM's DB2 database, 3270 'block mode' screens and generated COBOL code.
In the intervening years the toolset has been expanded to support additional development techniques such as Component Based Development; creation of client/server and web applications and generation of C, Java and C#. In addition, other platforms are now supported such as many variants of *ix-like Operating Systems (AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux) as well as Windows.
Its range of supported database technologies have widened to include ORACLE, SQL Server, ODBC, JDBC as well as the original DB2.
The toolset is fully integrated - objects identified during analysis carry forward into design without redefinition. All information is stored in a repository (central encyclopedia). The encyclopedia allows for large team development - controlling access so that multiple developers may not change the same object simultaneously.