Re: Looking for like-minded programmers who use the enhanced features of 5250

On Wed, Jun 27, 2018 at 12:24 PM Rob Berendt <rob@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<snip>
To me, one pretty-good approach is to have the 5250 character-based
interface available, along with a graphical interface - people can learn
to use what is more effective for the work they do.
</snip>

In theory this sounds good. What often happens however is the 5250 gets
the most effort and the GUI gets as much attention as the 5250 help screen
which says "my boss said to put some text here".

​Worse...there's always some doubling of work...if nothing else, testing is
doubled.

We use Profound here at my current company, and for a long time supported a
GUI & 5250 version of our application.

Changes to a screen required changing the 5250 source, the Profound source
and the program source. The program would then have to be compiled twice;
FPD1000D CF E WORKSTN
/IF DEFINED (WEB)
F HANDLER('PROFOUNDUI(HANDLER)')
/ENDIF

But you'd often end up with bits of code wrapped in a /IF DEFINED (WEB)
also if you wanted to really take advantage of what could be done in the
GUI...

Even then, IMHO...we often didn't make the most of profound given the need
to support a 5250 version.

Finally stopped enhancements to 5250 in 2016 and last year dropped it
altogether....

Life is much better :)

Charles

​