Hi John,
WDSC does a lot of things really well, but for plain old RPG /free
development I find few advantages over PDM.
I'm glad to hear that someone feels the same way I do. I was beginning
to think that something is wrong with me.
Some folks make fantastic claims that features like >25 lines on the
screen, code outlines and auto-complete make them "%50 more
productive", but for me, all that plus 50 cents will buy a cup of
coffee.
I find that I can get much fewer lines of code on the screen with WDSC,
which is one of my biggest frustrations with WDSC. I can fit 4 5250
emulators on my screen with no overlap, and I can view (or edit) one
source member in each one. I can also use these windows for running
programs or commands, working with spooled files, etc, without the need
to introduce a 5th window.
With WDSC I can fit one member on the screen at a time. I know how to
split the screen, but if I do that, I can only see a few lines of each
member, or if I split it vertically, I can only see either the left-hand
or right-hand part of the code. This isn't a problem with SEU because
of the multiple 5250 windows.
And this is a feature I use a lot. I'm always writing procedures in one
window and prototypes in another, or viewing database fields in one
window while coding statements that access them in another, or viewing
the HTML code for a form in one window, and the RPG code that processes
it in another... This is a constant thing for me, so the lack of
screen real estate is a pretty big deal.
The essential problem is all of the other little windows and decorations
in WDSC take up a lot of space. Plus the fact that you still need an
additional window for any 5250 work, means you need even more real estate.
I know, I know... "buy a bigger monitor". That's what Aaron did and
he loves WDSC.
The annoyances of the slowness of refreshing RSE and retrieving
source members,
Yes. Every time I mention how slow WDSC is, people give me a line of
crap about how cheap new PCs are. But, the main slowdowns in WDSC 7 are
due to the time it takes to refresh all of these filters, and most of
the processing is done on the System i, not the PC. Plus the time it
takes to download them...
Yes, I know how to use Ctrl-Shift-A. And it's better. But it still
seems to waste time resolving stuff the first time I connect... Not
sure why, but I hate it.
Plus, I don't always know the member name, and that means I have to
create a filter. (There are thousands of members in each source file,
scrolling through the list of members to find the one I want is way too
cumbersome. I have to use a filter for my sanity. And that's also slow
and cumbersome by comparison to SEU's "position to")
removing all those unwanted "endif' statments whenever I edit some
code and the general mouse-clicky style conflict with what I've grown
accustomed to.
I have the ENDIF thing turned off, and I use keyboard shortcuts for
pretty much everything else.
It reminds me of those HP-UX sysops I used to work with - never could
understand why they insisted on using that 'vi'le editor, but boy
were they fast.
That's what I use for Unix programming :)
The other problem I've had with WDSC, though I'm hoping it's fixed now
since I haven't seen it in awhile... when you go to save a member,
and everything looks good on the screen, but the changes never make it
back to the src-pf on the System i. There have been a lot of instances
of code being lost, or hours of troubleshooting for stuff that's already
been fixed due to the fact that the source didn't make it to the server
somehow. REally nasty. I'm very glad that I haven't seen that problem
yet in WDSC 7.
In general, though, it's gotten much better. It's faster with a smaller
footprint, the outline view doesn't crash anymore, etc. More stable
than it used to be.
Of course, my other complaint with it is that it's Windows-only. But I
have a feeling that this will never be fixed. I'd like it to be
cross-platform so I can run it on BSD, Mac, Linux, etc. For me, it's
mainly FreeBSD, but I'm sure others want to see it in these other places.
But, I'm using it more and more. I like the colorization (Granted, I
have to customize the color scheme before I like it, but... once I do
that, I like it.) I like the ability to convert to free form. I like
the SEP debugging. I like the fact that it brings in the compile errors
and lets me click each one to see the problem.
Ahh well, now I'm just rambling...
midrange.com
