Hi Patrik

I had to look back at Jon's posts in this thread - to check what he really said. He never mentioned specific compilers - you added to his statement by saying "Not RPG, not C." In fact, in one case he said "...baler twine, chewing gum and Krazy Glue..."

He does imply that SDA was on S/38 - "As to SMTP - I really doubt that the underlying code is as bad as SDA. It wasn't around on S/38 was it?"

I just ask that we be careful not to add to what others say - I'll try my best in that attempt, also.

As to the subject, I use the Screen Designer all the time - I find it works very well. I can do everything I did in SDA pretty easily. The main issue for many is that SDA was the only was to "easily" work with menus.

I have found a couple of Susan Gantner's presentations to be very helpful in learning to make Screen Designer dance - it can! I can't suggest strongly enough to have the Properties view open, and maybe also the Outline - I haven't used that much, but Susan says it can help with navigating in the source.

*Regards*

*Vern Hamberg*

IBM Champion 2025 <cid:part1.skkQHxE0.mpuxSsH5@centurylink.net> CAAC (COMMON Americas Advisory Council) IBM Influencer 2023

On 7/25/2025 7:14 AM, Patrik Schindler wrote:
Hello Richard,

Am 24.07.2025 um 16:33 schrieb Richard Schoen<richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

I’m not worried about me accessing SDA. I have my ways :-)
Good to know!

This is more about deprecating things from the OS that don’t really need to go away for any particular reason.
In an earlier thread, someone (Jon Paris?) pointed out that things as*SDA might stem from very early S/38 based code. Not RPG, not C. *Compilers which have been deprecated many OS releases ago and where keeping the runtime components integrated and working becomes a serious challenge. I can follow this argumentation.

Completely unrelated is that I am extremely sure IBM is just big enough to have all those legacy utilities rewritten in one of the currently available HLLs on IBM i. But then, this binds resources, costs money and IBM for decades is trying hard but inconsistently to kill the green screen. At least for end users. This inconsistency and large failure in "how to move to web easily" has been pointed out in other discussions, also. Mainly by Daniel Gross.

So, SDA is no more, and won't come back unless IBM becomes painfully aware (maybe due to many people expressing their disagreement on COMMON) that they are forced to recreate SDA because a majority of IBM i users require it to be available. I do not believe that the majority cares.

Might as well just throw out all 5250 development then :-)
I'm actually waiting for that to eventually happen. The writing has been on the wall for a long time. Although I'm in the comfy situation that I'm not a business and hence don't need to keep up with the perceived increasing speed of planned obsolescence IBM pushes through.

:wq! PoC


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