Re: IBM's Application Development Manager

["Simon Coulter" <shc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Neil,

You wrote:
>Does anyone have any experience/comments about IBM's Application 
>Development Manager (optional component of 5769-PW1 Application 
>Development Tools) ?

We use it here for all our change management.  It doesn't get much in the 
way of enhancements although you can still raise APARs against it and I know 
there are some major changes coming in 5.1 to support some of the H-spec 
keywords in RPG IV -- specifically the BNDDIR keyword.

>Are you satisfied with the features/performance ?

I'm happy enough with it but that's probably because it works very much like 
the IDSS system I used at IBM so I'm used to its foibles.  Others here have 
used the likes of Thenon and prefer that.  I suspect a lot of it is simply 
familiarity with a particular product.

>How does it compare to competitive products like Aldon/CMS or SoftLanding 
>Turnover ?

Don't know because I've never used them.  ADM does most of what I need to 
handle changes and build a product.  It does have some quirks in that I need 
to frequently create a BLDOPT part to control the creation of objects and it 
needs *PRDLOD and *PRDDFN objects to properly export a product.

There are some things it simply won't do:- 
        1/ Create an object to be owned by someone else e.g., QSECOFR
        2/ Use default skeletons or templates when a part is created
        3/ Nicely handle files without source e.g., program described files

Of those, item 2 is the most irritating but it can be worked around.

I understand the competitive products are easier to setup but once you 
design a good hierarchy for ADM I find it works well.  It doesn't have a 
strong API set but that's because it expects you to create your own versions 
of the ADM commands if you want to change the behaviour.  I can understand 
that argument but a set of exit points would be really useful.  It does 
allow you to create your own 'compilers' for user-defined parts but there 
can be a fair bit of work involved in that.

I suspect ADM's biggest failing is that it expects you to build AS/400 
applications the way the system was designed to be used which is likely not 
how most sites build applications.  If you still code like a S/36 programmer 
then you'll find ADM an absolute pig.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.

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