"E" may give good ROI, but the up-front costs can be ridiculous.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Paris [mailto:jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, December 13, 2017 3:40 PM
To: Midrange-L Midrange-l <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Moving from Green screen app to GUI because of push back
It is not a question of _can_ you do it without third party tools Booth.
It is a question of value for money and how far you can go for the $.
There is a learning curve no matter what you do.
To me the biggest advantage of going beyond "roll your own" is that other people have already made the mistakes for you. That alone is worth a lot of money in time saving. IBM i shops reinvent the darned wheel way too often.
So what are the options? And the related "costs"? Well for example:
A) If I use raw CGI APIs I have next to nothing in the way of pre-canned tools available to help me. There is also a real shortage of code samples and other education. In order to use jQuery or other similar tools to produce truly modern apps I have a very heavy learning curve.
B) If I use CGIDEV2 (or Brad's CGI package - although that has a cost associated with it) I get some pre-canned tools and a bit more in the way of tutorials etc. but using jQuery etc. still requires some significant effort.
C) If I use PHP (I could also say Python or node.js or ...) I get lots of education, massive numbers of pre-built tools (free and fee) that can save me hours and hours of work. Ready access to staff who know how to program for the web ... I can call back into my existing RPG logic, etc. etc. Many of the tools will offer me an easy way into jQuery which brings me to ...
D) If I use a low-cost tool like PHPGrid on top of my PHP I can increase my productivity by another order of magnitude and also get easy interaction of jQuery capability into my apps. If you are interested in seeing PHPGrid take a look at this article and then tell me how much RPG code it would take to do this:
http://ibmsystemsmag.com/ibmi/developer/modernization/grid_tools <
http://ibmsystemsmag.com/ibmi/developer/modernization/grid_tools>
E) If I use Profound UI (or any off the many other tools in this arena) I am buying into years of experience of building web apps in RPG using an extended 5250 model so that I can readily take what I have and move it forward. Does it cost $s ? Yes but you can test drive for free. I am far from convinced that such products do actually cost $s in the long run - the enhanced capabilities and RPG orientation make them reasonably easy to learn and you become productive very quickly. I've seen this happen on client sites with Profound, Lansa, Look, Rocket, and CNX to name just a few.
Any and all of these approaches can be used in combination. And I do. But personally I would never go down to A or even B again. I might use a tool like Renaissance or powerExt - which are CGIDEV2 "extensions" but if I'm trying to modernize existing green screen apps then I'm going to start at C and work upwards depending on my code base, available skills and depth of pocket book. Most of the E level are worth every cent in my book - but if the budget is really tight then I'd use a more conservative approach.
All of this of course ignores what might be considered a more important aspect of modernization like the database but we're talking green screen here so ...
Jon Paris
www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com
midrange.com
