Re: How are you modernising your as400 applications?

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Even in very small shops, you should still be able to split the load, at
least in a JSP Model II environment.  If you're getting into the web,
chances are you will want to have a web presence.  You'll want your
applications to mirror that presence, especially if you're going to
implement B2B or B2C applications.  In that case, what you need is pretty
much a full-time web designer, someone who really understands HTML and CSS.
(It's an added expense, but if you calculate the hours your RPG programmers
would spend you can usually justify the HTML designer cost, especially since
they typically work a bit cheaper than RPG developers.)

That person then only needs to know about the individual tags you generate
for your JSPs.  Then they can use their favorite HTML editor to make the
screen pretty, inserting your tags where appropriate.

The trick is to make sure your JSPs are relatively vanilla and make good use
of CSS for their definition.  CSS really helps separate the GUI programmer
from the GUI designer.

Joe


> From: Mike Eovino
> 
> But that's easy for my shop, we have 30 or so programmers on staff.
> We can have a couple of UI specialists and feed them enough work to
> keep them busy.  It's going to be much tougher on the small shops that
> the iSeries is famous for.