Re: RPG,COBOL or JAVA -- MIDRANGE-L

I don't believe RPG and COBOL will disappear in the near or distant future, but I think and hope Java will have a major impact in the AS/400 arena in the next few years.

I have programmed heavily in some variation of RPG for the past 17 years, the last few in ILE. However, we switched all of our new development to Java in May of this year and I have been programming exclusively in Java since then.

Some insights from our experiences with Java and RPG:

Java is ready NOW for any type of business application I can think of. We are using JDK 1.1.6 and JFC 1.1. These versions far exceed the current capabilities and productivity of RPG/ILE in all areas except for printing. And it's getting alot better very quickly. I don't understand the talk about waiting for Java to "mature".
Printing is currently non-existent in Java compared to RPG. JDK 1.2 (just released) has made significant improvements in this area, but I am unfamiliar with them. We are contininuing to use RPG for printing fuctions.
The productivity of our Java programmers exceeds that of our RPG programmers by a factor of at least 5 to 10. In some cases even more. Our average RPG experience is over 10 years. No Java programmer has more than 8 months of experience with Java but all are either experienced RPG or C++ programmers. We had a college intern work on a Java project this summer. He coded circles around any of our RPG programmers. This is due to the nature of the languages, not the skills of the programmers. We have developed an extensive set of base classes and Java beans which is also a large factor in improved productivity.
The creme of the crop(1400,1500 SAT's,etc) in regard to college students or recent grads in computer related areas either know Java or C++. They have absolutely no interest in RPG and I don't blame them. These "wiz kids" can hit the deck running in Java.
We have found Java is alot easier to learn for a new programmer than RPG. OO however is another story. There are obviously alot more resources for Java than RPG--books, classes, etc.
Because of the standard design and modeling methodologies and tools for OO, projects can be organized with experienced analysts with business application knowledge designing and modeling a system, with "wiz kids" banging out goobs of code. This scenario just doesn't work in the RPG world because there is no standard modeling language such as UML for RPG. Nor are there any design or modeling tools that translate well into construction with RPG.
There are no IDE's such as VisualAge for Java, for development in RPG. I have used both VisualAge for RPG and Code/400. Neither are in the same league as VAJ.
We've had six different Java programmers working on different projects. All of their code looks relatively similar to each other. Reading and debugging someone else's code in Java is surprisingly easy. Reading and debugging someone else's RPG code is torture, even though we have established programming standards for RPG. Unlimited variable size names have alot to do with this.
Java performance does not yet compare to RPG but is within the acceptable range on the platforms we have deployed on--400 Mhz NT box and middle of the road AS/400 620. SQL is actually a bigger performance problem at this time. We are thinking of using stored procedures (in RPG by the way) for data base access in future development.

Java is superior to RPG for most functions primarily because of its OO capabilities. However, RPG can obviously do the job for business applications and in some areas, such as printing and performance, is currently and may always be superior to Java. And due to its huge "critical mass", RPG isn't going away any time soon, if ever.

Thanks,

Dave Duerr

-----Original Message-----
From: Uttam H Naidu <UTTAMHN@india.mastech.com>
To: 'MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com' <MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com>
Date: Monday, December 07, 1998 1:01 AM
Subject: RPG,COBOL or JAVA

>Hi AS400 members,
>
> I have a question. How many of you RPG and COBOL programmers
>would really want to switch to JAVA. Do you see it really necessary for
>one to upgrade in this language as IBM has a lot of stuff already for
>JAVA.
>
> I just want to know is it the bread for the future AS400
>programmers. Your suggestions will be very help for me.
>
>Regards,
>Uttam H. Naidu
>
>
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