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Perhaps a few of my observations about WDSC and EGL comes across as FUD, but that's probably true in any point/counter-point discussion. I've just been getting in to WDSC lately, myself. Colleagues in our local users group have remarked about updates destabilizing their PCs. Perhaps if you have enough memory and CPU it's not a problem. That's been the standard answer for PC environments for a couple of decades. But we may be entering an era where less, instead of more, is better. PC's have been a democratizing force, but the Internet is an even bigger democratizing force, leading to the possibility of rich-thin user interfaces at the client level, supported by powerful servers anywhere on the grid. I apologize for the number of times I've talked about the program at MIT, named One Laptop Per Child, which has a goal of deploying millions of low-cost laptops to students around the world, with the hope of enabling them to wirelessly connect to the grid for applications and information. We could eventually see a movement away of powerful desktop systems, in favor of more rugged, portable, lightweight, scaled-back units. Low-cost devices that are somewhere in between a PC and a terminal. What a remarkable, democratizing force that would be! We may be on the verge of seeing lightweight Linux based devices, running cool 500 MHz processors, using USB drives and Flash memory, a browser and a few essential applications onboard, instead of the tendency of packing nearly every kind of device imaginable into desktop and laptop PCs, along with correspondingly bloated operating systems and applications that feed on that kind of power. The iSeries is positioned well to have a place in that kind of world. We may be seeing the crest of oversized desktop development and runtime environments. Compare an open source environment like Rails, where somebody contributes a script to generate a shell for an application that implements some sort of model for database maintenance, to a tool that uses a tightly coupled WYSIWYG editor and 4GL language to generate 3GL languages and user interfaces. They may call that enterprise development, but with a tool like Rails, some kid in Thailand is going to whip out a comparable application in half the time, using his $100 laptop, and deploy it for anyone having access to the Internet. Nathan Andelin ----- Original Message ---- From: Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2006 2:43:11 PM Subject: Re: [WEB400] Ruby On Rails on the iSeries I don't want to really get into a debate here, but I do have to answer a few of these points. Take the time to work with Rails and you'll find that it, like many other frameworks, is simply a fast way to do certain things. And while some of the concepts may seem cool at first, I find the conventions to eventually be too restrictive for enterprise programming. For example, you need to remember to name your tables plurally. A reference to another table is the SINGULAR of that table name with "_id" concatenated. You don't HAVE to follow this convention, but you lose some benefits if you don't. It has some neat features, and it is more complete than some of the other frameworks, but the exact same components exist for many other languages, such as Perl. The "programming by convention" is perhaps a nicety for people who don't like to type, but I've never been particularly enamored by something that magically figures out code based on naming conventions; inevitably I need to break the naming convention and bad things happen. Moving on, your bit about EGL being heavy is just silly. WDSC is certainly heavy, but that's because it's a full-fledged IDE. Ruby on Rails, for example, is a primarily text-based scripting environment. Try renaming something in Ruby and see if it automatically fixes every reference. EGL, on the other hand, is about as light a framework as I've seen. You define data elements with as much (or as little) metadata as you want, group those data elements into records, and then use the records to build your UI and your database access. Specify something as a key field in a record and it is used as a key in database access and is protected in the UI when updating a record. It's simple, clean and really fast. I'd also like to dispel some of your WDSC FUD. Yes, WDSC updates are large. As are iSeries cumes. That's because they're large products, and if a monthly download of a GB is too much for you, then you ought to find another platform. Also, you can download the updates and then apply them later, so you don't have to "worry about the network going down". Finally, it's been a long time since a WDSC update destabilized my workbench... and I do a LOT of work with WDSC. When is the last time you saw someone do an update that actually broke their working environment? Anyway, enough of this. There's nothing wrong with Ruby. Or Tapestry, or Turbine and Velocity, or Zope, or Laszlo, or any of a number of other frameworks out there. Me, I prefer an environment that will allow me to quickly build a thin framework that will in turn access RPG, and JSP Model II is the answer for that. The question is whether EGL provides the productivity for JSP Model II that Visual Studio provides for .NET, and my initial take on it is that it is headed in the right direction. Joe
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