Re: IBM i 7.6 Development tools

On the OA-RPG thing, I was there when that first came out - I was on the ISV Advisory council then, around 2007. There was never a "product" that IBM was going to product, this was a way to take what is done with RLA and interpose your own process using the data that RPG gets from database and all. Barbara provides a data structure that essentially has everything that any of the various record-level processes work with. Profound UI was one vendor who use that structure and combine it with some DSPF niceties to make possible all manner of web presentation - not screen-scraping. At the time I wrote an article on OA-RPG in April, 2011, there were 3 vendors using the OA process for the web.

IBM has a long practice of providing tools and support for vendors to provide enhanced products - sometimes IBM ends up producing their own equivalent, that is always a risk when you are a vendor partner - I heard that from the head of the vendor I worked for in 1990.

*Regards*

*Vern Hamberg*

IBM Champion 2025 <cid:part1.wbU0AI0g.WbiNc8nY@centurylink.net> CAAC (COMMON Americas Advisory Council) IBM Influencer 2023

On 4/21/2025 11:56 AM, Daniel Gross wrote:

21.04.2025 at 17:40 myibmi wrote:
Move away from 5250, yes - but with what? JWalk, EGL, VRPG? Useless in the past! How much time and money was wasted.

True 100%

And the problem was not so much the money that IBM wasted - maybe not even the money that the customers wasted ... the main problem was the wasted time.

And now? Make web applications. Gladly, but give me the right tool for it.

Right - there should have been a fully integrated template engine (DDS is nothing less) and application server that should have made it easy.

Yes, there are 3rd party products - even some of them are free - but NO offer from IBM.

If you believe rumors, that IBM would have had such an OA solution, put it in the drawer.

I don't know - the way Profound built their tool is so in line with OA-RPG that it seems, that maybe they bought the product before it was completed by IBM - or they had a lot of insider information, and IBM scrapped their own product then.

Then database. The RDB is great, but ancient. I cheered when an announcement came that MongoDB would be available on the i.

Aaah - No - the relational database model hasn't reached end-of-life - and some would dare say that RDBMS have not only catched up to Non-RDBMS but even surpassed them.

Especially since the SQL standard has embraced JSON and XML as part language - and Db2 is riding that wave quite good.

There are a few things, where Db2 for i is lacking some features, but not that much. As an example, it would be nice, if Db2 would embrace snapshots instead of locks for transaction isolation, like PostgreSQL - but that's another story.

At least 7.6 brought us OLD/NEW/FINAL TABLE support for UPDATE and DELETE ... it was about time - hopefully MERGE will be next.

Why I'm so excited about? Because it maps data in a natural way. An order e.g. contains all the relevant data in a single document and still has full relational data access.

In fact "(pseudo) hierarchical database models" evolved quite early - and at first they really look good. But in the end, the RDB model is superior, because it can be applied to any structure.

And with SQL we have a language to transform that internal structure into an application centric "view" - and for most, you only have to do that transformation once, and can re-use it everywhere.

In the future, I no longer see the IBM i as a scale-out system as well. Rather an enterprise system for large companies with their own staff.

Well yes - that seems to be the sad reality - IBM has dropped it IMHO again, and left the small and medium customers in the cold.

And now, what keeps you on the IBM i, the web server, the database, the development environment, the operating system?

Personally - the development environment with the integrated database - or maybe it's the database with the integrated development environment ... some say it so, same the other way around.

And I also love that tight Integration of RPG and SQL - I used so many languages, databases and systems in my career, but NONE / ZERO were only near that form of integration - and only near that development speed.

Regards,
Daniel