Re: AW: AW: Open Access to be generally available as part of the RPGcompiler

Hire Henrik to do it on a fixed bid - All work to be completed In One Month. ;-)
- sjl


"Bernd Dworrak" wrote in message news:mailman.556.1328251774.29960.rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx...

Henrik Rützou wrote:

To me RPG OA is a Program Ephemera. It’s like CCP on System/3 where everybody knew that this wasn’t going to last and CCP also completely disappeared with the introduction of System/34-36-38 with RPG 5250 support through FORMATS and DDS....
What I don’t like about RPG OA is that it binds the programmer to a couple of proprietary vendors of handlers and thereby whatever these vendor tools in their “black box” can do...

And

On the other hand... I think Henrik is forgetting that there are millions of already written programs that use the display file paradigm, and that the amount of work needed to refactor all of those programs might be prohibitive.
95% can be rewritten in one month!...

Well, although I think that RPG OA will last more than a few months, I will explain my skepticism to make it more clear.
We have about one thousand different display files and each has a number of five formats on an average without the special adaptations for individual customers.
And there are new DSPF coming each and every month.
This means that one has to refactor about five thousand screens and not only that, but to make them work in a correct way by testing!
How should this be done within a reasonable period at reasonable cost?
Don't forget, our company is an ISV and we have to face the competition with others that build applications for "WINTEL" machines.
This means, even if we would license a tool from one of the handler vendors and pay a lot of bucks for it, we will still have the problem to calculate the costs for our customers.
You know how good the system i is, but it is more expensive than a x86 server.
In most cases the user of a system I also pays more money for the software. An example: compare T.L. Ashford labeling software and Seagull Scientific Bartender ;-)
So I can understand the reasoning that RPG OA binds companies like ours to a couple of proprietary vendors of handlers and their refactoring tools.
I cannot understand how - in our case - 95 percent of the code could be rewritten in one month. This is absolutely unthinkable.

Greetings
Bernd Dworrak, Dipl.-Phys.