<snip from Bob Cancilla>
Aaron,
Nathan, your argument about the value of DDS and ease of development for 5250
UI is certainly true, but... The majority of our customers need more than
the 5250. They must have (not an option) robust Web applications and they
must be able to interoperate with customers and trading partners via web services.
</snip>
It was a little surprising to see my name mentioned with Aaron's in this context. I understand that a lot of RPG developers have been pounding on IBM to come up with a new opcode comparable to EXFMT that produced HTML or some other GUI output, but I haven't been one of them. I think Aaron is in favor of it, however.
A couple years ago I demonstrated a prototype using a SPECIAL file with READ and WRITE opcodes to interface with browsers, which was cool in it's simplicity, but I quickly dropped the idea because I felt it was too confining. IBM was also promoting Webfacing at that time and I didn't see much difference between Webfacing and my SPECIAL file prototype, except that my prototype ran entirely under the native virtual machine, which removed Websphere from the mix, but I've never promoted that type of interface, and still feel that it's overly confining.
I tend to develop user interfaces with multiple inline frames, where multiple frames may be active concurrently, so a browser version of EXFMT wouldn't work for me. While I use RPG for Web applications, it just wouldn't work for my programs to be waiting for a input via EXFMT type opcodes, which would be geared more toward traditional page at a time user interfaces.
Nathan.
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