Re: Flex & RPG

["Stuart Milligan" <stuartm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Simon Coulter wrote:

?The components, probably from a vendor, plugged into the Open
I/O interface will convert the data to a form appropriate for the current
client device in a similar manner to how Workstation Function Management
currently merges a record format and display file into a 5250 data stream.?

We built such a client using GWT. The GWT client is downloaded upon logging
in to the web page, it then receives JSON from a java bean that combines
screen layout info from database driven screen definitions, plus the dynamic
data content from the user data. The main differences is that the way we
designed it was using MVC and so the control was passed to the client by the
server program and vice versa when a server based action was triggered at
the client. It would be trivial to replace the java bean with an RPG program
that has open I/O and send the data directly to the GWT client.

the GWT client project was a lengthy (5 year) digression from our mainstream
strength, which is to reengineer existing applications into reusable and
modern formats. Aside from our analysis and design recovery, this comes in
two flavours: strategic auto-rewrite into new languages/patterns/frameworks
from extracted designs (flex being one of these), and conservative as we see
it- reengineering monolithic RPG into modular RPG for reuse. Anyone wanting
to pick up this GWT client project and rework it according to their own
vision is welcome to. We don?t have the management bandwidth to work out how
to open source this ourselves, but hopefully from discussions with Aaron and
others we can make this code base generally available quite soon. Perhaps
someone can turn it onto the Vendor product Simon refers to above. Like
Nathan mentioned in an earlier post, we are going to leave screen rendering
up to the big boys, for now anyway.

On the Flex issue, we are going to release our production version of our
reengineering into Flex in about 10 weeks. The standards/architecture that
we will use will be documented and made available on our website as part of
our normal product documentation. None of it is proprietary so hopefully it
might be useful to those of you who are embarking on handcrafting Flex
project on IBM i applications. There will be monthly posts on our X-Analysis
Professional group in linked in about this subject too. In the meantime if
anyone has any more good/bad experiences/comments/ideas or advice about
Flex, we certainly appreciate all the input so far.

Stuart Milligan