Re: Drag & drop -- WEB400

Buck wrote:

Joe Pluta wrote:

You don't have to do any of that with EGL. Creating web pages is drag and drop, data is automatically bound to the page, styles are set with point and click. AJAX is added with a properties page; you bind a button on a page to a function in the EGL with drag-and-drop.

I've made more than one web based app, all for internal use / proof of concept. Mix of technologies including 'Google & go' :-), WebFacing, Lansa, Obsydian, CGIDEV2 and home-grown RPG-CGI before CGIDEV2 was popular. I'm not proficient in any of them. I tried the Yahoo and Google toolkits. My apps always look bad and are never 'webby' enough until a GUI guy gets in there and does it right. Even my mashups look bad.

The RDSC page looks pretty nice.

What are the chances that a 30 year green screen RPG programmer (me) with a proven record of ugly web apps is going to use a drag & drop IDE to create a web app that looks and behaves like the RDSC page using a plain vanilla, factory-fresh RDi-SOA install? Remember, you told me over and over that I don't need to know Java or Javascript. I want to make a web page like that with just drag & drop -- no tweaking Javascript or Ajax or any of that.

It depends on what you're willing to learn. The high end GUI stuff - what Walden calls "advanced" graphics, is not for the faint of heart. But on the other hand, dropping a table of data onto a web page and loading it by calling an RPG program or executing an SQL statement - that you can do, just by walking through the tutorial. There may be one gotcha when you have to define the location of the program; it's an ugly properties page and it's counter-intuitive as heck. But once you've done it once, you can clone it for any other program.

I'm not a complete idiot (several important parts are still missing) - I can use the Gimp to make clothes for Second Life. They are (of course) ugly :-) I'm not very graphical I guess, and what I think is 'webby' tends not to be viewed that way by others.

If you can't design a good web page, period, you're not going to do it in any tool. But I guaran-dang-tee that you will do WORSE with RPG-CGI, since you will have to control every little piece of it. YOu will start out with a bad page from Dreamweaver and make it worse with RPG-CGI. At least with EGL it makes some good assumptions on what data should look like and then lets you fill in the rest.

More importantly, though, is that with EGL there is an option for complete separation of duties. You, the RPG guy, write the business logic. You talk to other people through data structures which are passed to you as parameters. You don't give a hoot about the user interface.

And then you hand that off to the EGL programmer. That person can write thick client, rich client, thin client, it don't matter. They can call your program directly, or they can use a few lines of EGL to expose it as a service to others. But you the RPG programmer never have to touch the "webby" stuff. Can't say that about RPG-CGI.

Joe