I've been banging the EGL drum for a while now, primarily because I see
how incredibly powerful it is. And recently I made a couple of comments
about a project I've been working on where I was writing back-end
business logic in RPG and exposing it as web services using EGL.
Meanwhile, someone else was writing a rich client UI for those same
servers, again using EGL.
I got some grief for this, but I think if you saw what can be done, you
would agree that it's light years ahead of anything else. I'm not
talking about putting lipstick on the 5250 pig (and I;m not demeaning
the idea, after all I have a product that does it quite well) but
instead I'm giving developers a way to get to the next level - RPG
business logic with powerful, graphical user interfaces that are
media-independent.
It's time, then, to show it off. Please go to
http://www.laffra.com at
your convenience to take a look at the live scheduling application that
will be running at the Rational Software Developers Conference in June.
Chris Laffra and I wrote the whole thing in our spare time. There are
currently about two dozens web services, which Chris and I designed on
the fly as our needs expanded. In just a few weeks we added Web 2.0
features -- voting, tagging, even realtime chat -- all sorts of
capabilities to what started out as just a simple scheduling app.
And it runs on an iPhone.
Technically this particular application is a web application, but I
don't want you to pigeonhole the architecture. On my LAN I get
subsecond (heck, nearly instantaneous) response time, so it would be
perfectly acceptable to use this as the interface for a local
application. It is in fact a perfect architecture for a thin client
installation - cheap terminals with powerful graphical interfaces loaded
from a central server.
Please realize the first download takes a little while. It's a big app,
and it's running through a little pipe, especially if you run off of my
WebSphere instance. Oh, did I mention that it's dually deployed? It's
running both off a hosted PHP server running a LAMP stack, and also off
my machine running WebSphere. All back-end logic is done using RPG on a
model 270.
The entire application is a few thousand lines of code, distributed
between client-side EGL (Chris' stuff) and RPG business logic, with just
a couple hundred lines of EGL to expose the RPG servers. It took about
three weeks of the spare time of two people.
This is the benchmark, then. If anybody would like to write a
comparable application, then we can compare the approaches.
Joe Pluta
http://www.plutabrothers.com
EGL puts the i in iPhone.
midrange.com
