Hi Jerry,
We just went through a process of trialing three solutions. A colleague
did most of the work and I am enclosing his response below because he
isn't on this list.
Regards,
Bobby
We did a trial of Genie by Profound Logic, aXes by Lansa, and Presto by
Fresche Solutions. (We ultimately went with Presto.)
Genie is normally sold as part of the very expensive Profound UI, but
they will give you a quote for Genie in standalone if you ask. Genie and
aXes were comparable in price, while Presto is potentially cheaper
depending on the number of seats you want (only Presto is seat-based;
the other two are priced by your IBM i processor); also ask Fresche
about adding on individual seats if you're somewhere between the seat
counts they offer. Also, you'll find Presto's annual maintenance is
cheaper because they price it off a fraction of the initial purchase not
counting the training package, whereas the other two base their
maintenance fees on a percentage of the entire purchase (including
training).
In terms of features and ease of use, Genie was the simplest and most
straightforward, but I felt it was a bit too simple, and its
out-of-the-box page transformations were the least impressive of the
three. But it's probably the easiest to learn, and you could still do a
lot in it by adding in custom CSS and JavaScript. You may also find that
when Profound Logic gives you a demo of Genie, they may mention
downsides of Genie to try to push you toward Profound UI, so take that
as you will.
aXes seemed okay overall, but I didn't love some aspects of the editor
(your mileage may vary). Their sales and support people seemed plenty
helpful, but their tutorials could use some work. I had difficulty
trying to get a FileMaker Pro web viewer to make use of aXes's
JavaScript functions, but that probably wouldn't be a dealbreaker for
most customers, and there was a workaround if I felt like putting the
development time in. I also thought aXes put a bit too much emphasis on
global substitutions (AutoGUI), but overall it seems like a competent
product that I wouldn't discourage anyone from trying. Oh, they also had
a nice spool file manager.
Presto was really the winner for us when it came to the balance of
advanced features and ease of use. The out-of-the-box transformations
are pleasant without any customization on your part, but you can also
use their drag-and-drop Visual Editor (Windows only) for making plenty
of transformations, or you can add custom JavaScript to control even
more complex transformations (not necessary in many cases, but nice that
it's there). And their support team has been outstanding in terms of
responsiveness and helpfulness regarding troubleshooting or just
brainstorming ways to do something new you're trying to implement.
The biggest downside to Presto in my opinion is their documentation,
which comes in the form of a nearly 600-page PDF (though they seemed
interested in my critiques/suggestions regarding the documentation). The
PDF has a lot of content (and some fluff), and it covers a lot of what I
was interested in learning regarding custom JavaScript add-ons, but
there are some functions that you'd only learn about digging through
Knowledge Base articles (they'll give you a MyFrescheSolutions.com
<
http://MyFrescheSolutions.com> account to access these during your
trial), or from speaking with support. (You could also try your hand at
dissecting presto.js, which comes minified but not obfuscated.) But
because support is so helpful, if you tell them something you're trying
to do and it involves a function you don't know about, you will
definitely know all about it by the time you're done with them.
A few other points of comparison: Genie and aXes use web-based editors,
while Presto's editor is a Windows-only program. Also, in both Genie and
aXes, you can define separate customization projects ("skins" or
"themes") and switch between them to your liking. In Presto, you'd need
two different Presto installs with their own libraries and IFS folders,
which makes it seem kind of cumbersome to promote between a development
and production environment (we haven't tried to set this up yet). I
don't love that, but we went with Presto because of its many other benefits.
Overall, I'd say try a trial of aXes and Presto and see if either one
clicks with you better, and make sure to ask some questions of their
support teams to see what kinds of responses you get. If you have time
for a third trial or if the other two seem way too complicated, then try
Genie.
There's also a much, much cheaper option called greenscreens.io
<
http://greenscreens.io>, but you're going to be doing pretty much
everything yourself in JavaScript with that option. Here's a link to
their API docs:
https://www.greenscreens.io/doc/api/
On 5/24/2022 14:08, (WalzCraft) Jerry Forss wrote:
Hi All,
I am looking for recommendations on packages we can use to modernize from Green Screen to GUI.
I am not looking for just a screen scraper although it could be used during the conversion.
We got a price from Profound and it is WAY too expensive for a 1-2 developer shop.
I know it is wonderful product but there is no way I am even going to present it to the owner, just not cost effective for 1-2 developers.
Looking for what are all the options and why you like them.
Want as little current RPG code changes as possible but will do what is needed to move forward.
Vendor opinions are welcome.
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