RE: RPGIII compiler vs Visual Basic

["phil Kestenbaum" <pkestenbaum@xxxxxxxxx>]

I was at a fairly large Manufacturer about 18 months ago was still using their 
1990 package (RPG). They had 2 programmers, one Programming manager, and one 
admin. Of course the coding was very tedious, but they were addressing this w/ 
a reporting tool.
Personally, I have never experienced problems w/ the windows environment except 
for Email hiccups, so I would love to hear some stories. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Joe Pluta [mailto:joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, June 16, 2005 10:33 AM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: RE: RPGIII compiler vs Visual Basic


Rob, you keep moving farther from the point.  I was talking specifically
about the investment of programs you have written in RPG vs. any
Microsoft language.  You keep bringing up tangential stuff.

TSM is a product, and that's what sometimes happens to products; they
reach the end of their life cycle.  That's part of the decision of make
vs. buy.  Had you written your own version of TSM in RPG it would still
be working.  There are far more Windows-based products that have
life-cycled, a good number of them because each version of Windows is
incompatible with the previous one.

It may cost you some money to keep your SNA code.  Not sure, but you
need to do the homework then make the decision.  But that's the same
issue we have with token ring, and with BSC.  They're old technology,
they're getting sunsetted as well.  At what point to you make the
decision to use the new technology?

I do agree with the IMPF commands; that was an unforgivable blunder
which they seem to be working to fix.  Of course you can get around
these rather easily with your own code, but I think someone over at IBM
dropped the ball on that one.  It's not the only one!  The WebSphere
3.5->4.0->5.0 fiasco nearly put me out of business.  So I'm not saying
IBM is perfect.

But for every one of these you can mention for your decades of time in
the iSeries, you can come up with dozens of examples from the MS world,
from OS incompatibility to application incompatibility to security
breaches to just plain broken code.

But there's simply no parallel in the industry to the amount of
protection your RPG business logic investment has gotten from IBM over
the last 30 years.  Hell, there's probably RPG code running out there
that was written before Windows existed.

Joe



> From: rob@xxxxxxxxx
> 
> And what does IBM typically charge for programs migrated from the
zseries
> to the iSeries?