After doing a little reading on Infocenter about SPL (which I should have
done first, my apologies) I can see how they could be powerful in extending
the iSeries to other platforms that want to communicate via ODBC/JDBC
specifically. How is SPL superior on the batch processing front (from your
original post)?
In answer to your bottom comment. The reason to stay with RPG can simply be
because shops/programmers need to be responsible for pursuing ROI. The
shops in question have made considerable investment in the System i5.
Obviously it is also the programmers responsibility to understand what else
is out there that could be better for their organization regarding new
software stacks, but I see people jumping ship way too soon after seeing a
few cool features of a new language/IDE. This is often done without an
understanding of what the decision implications will look like in 10 years.
I fully understand that developing an next generation RPG apps from the
ground up could potentially take 1.5 times more than a .NET or EGL/Java
equivalent. The thing most decision makers don't understand is that post
new development can be overwhelming based on the entire long term lifecycle
of software.
Here's an interesting thought. Would a company ever adopt RPG as their
*future* development language? :-)
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Steve Richter
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2007 4:04 PM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] EGL FUD
On Dec 16, 2007 3:50 PM, Aaron Bartell <albartell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Steve, I think if your exposure to RPG was better than it is, then you
wouldn't be making those comments.
I dont think so. I have a lot of RPG experience. Perhaps you are not
familiar with sql procedure language? Where you can write sql procedures
that can be debugged with the ILE debugger, can call other procedures with
parameters, declare variables, has language looping constructs, fetch first
row only into procedure variables, and of course use all the sql statements
and functions. If you want to implement business logic of any complexity
which returns result sets to client apps like crystal reports or an
asp.netweb page, sql procedures are a superior solution to RPG.
I must agree that RPG, compared with
languages like Java and C#, could be considered dead. But when you are
talking about RPG on the i5, a shop with a solid team of programmers can
make RPG sing sweetly to meet a variety of needs. The hard part is
getting
that solid team of programmers, which is maybe where you are drawing your
conclusions from?
you can make RPG do great things, also sql procedures, java, c#, ... The
question the RPG shop has to answer to their management is why put so much
effort into RPG? The only valid answer I see is legacy applications. If you
are writing a new app on the system i5 the combination of sql procedures and
.NET is far superior to some RPG web hodgepodge.
-Steve
midrange.com
