RE: RE: Opinions Wanted -- WEB400

I am hearing a lot of my feelings being relayed through the other posts
that have gone through this thread. I wanted to touch on one point that
somebody made (can't remember who), but the basic gist of it was that he
wanted IBM to come to his shop and show him how he could implement it in
his environment.

Some of the MS tools are complex, IMO, like Biztalk. But the beauty of
it is that Microsoft recognizes this and their motto to my corporation
has been "we want you to get the most out of our products, so we will
come on-site and train you for free".  Yes, that's right, FREE! Of
course only the first so many hours were free, but I bet that we were
into a couple hundred before it was billable.  I know some of the M$
reps by their first name a long with some of their techies, AND I AM NOT
EVEN A MICROSOFT PROGRAMMER!  Microsoft has set aside huge amounts of
money to educate the users of their software so they can fully utilize
the feature set, and therefore be more dependant on the product.  They
also sent us to their MTC (Microsoft Training Center) in Chicago
(multiple times) and treated us like kings!

--Complexity of WDSc--

To put it plainly, when I first looked into IBM's JSF implementation in
WDSc (which is a better approach than straight JSP IMO), I was
completely overwhelmed. I looked at the Classifieds example and that
lost me quickly.  I instead opted to go with MyEclipseIDE which came
with a standard JSF implementation and support for Hibernate for my
DAO's.  I picked up JSF and a data access methodology much faster this
way because I could actually understand and see what it was doing.  I
plan on going back to WDSc sometime in the near future, because now I
can see the benefit and power to their tools.

What they really need is to address one of the audiences they are trying
to "convert".  How about develop an RPG application (not too complex,
but not too simple) and then build the JSF equivalent. If they are
saying move to Java (JSF) then they need some practical applications
that RPG programmers work with on a daily basis.  How about a simple
maintenance app?  I ended up going else ware to get all of my "newbie"
knowledge (which then led me away from IBM's WDSc).

I don't know, it just seems like IBM doesn't have much in the way of
fore thought in their marketing department. Nearly everything I see
coming out of M$ "looks cool" and invites me in.  IBM just doesn't seem
to have that effect, even though they have superior product.  They have
to learn that there is an entire generation of programmers out there
that make decisions on things that "look cool" and whether or not they
are able to be up and running in 1 day.

Aaron Bartell