Re: Flex & RPG

[Thorbjoern Ravn Andersen <ravn@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Stuart Milligan skrev:
> Thorbjoern,
>
>  
>
> I wouldn't say we wrote this investment off, but rather as you point out it
> was manifest in a completely different end result than we originally
> envisioned 12 years ago.  More than happy to chat with you about technology
> and experiences in the java world. It would be nice to know that the
> investment is being appreciated for as long as possible J Java is still very
> much strategic but increasingly we see its role in the framework and
> business logic as most relevant. As a company we are brutal when it comes to
> assessing development productivity
>   
It is important to find the right time to let a given technology go.



>  
>
> How would you like to start that? Tell me a bit more about what you are
> doing and/or I will also make a list of bullet points about experiences that
> you can take shots at. That should get things going nicely. If you are on
> linked in I would prefer to do it there, as it's a LOT easier to follow a
> discussion in that format. If not midrange.com is fine
>   
We have a legacy system written in Cobol which our customers are 
basically happy with, but which suffers from all the usual issues with 
AS/400 applications.  Green screens, hard to exchange files, etc. 

The stuff we cannot do easily in Cobol, we do in Java (mostly by me) 
like automated ftp transfers, XML transformations and manipulations 
etc.   We made a decision a while back that our Java components should 
behave like our Cobol components as seen by the programmers, which has 
worked very well, but due to the startup time of the JVM we only do very 
large chunks like an embedded web server.  I'd wondered if we could get 
access to the 5250 facilities, but for batch jobs it works really nice.

My interest is learning how to efficiently do things on the AS/400 using 
Java - things I haven't thought of my self, things that might be 
differently done in Java than in the Cobol mindset, and perhaps even 
doing things in the Flex mind set, may save us a lot of time, which is 
interesting with few developers.

I am currently adapting a JSF-application and it takes quite a while to 
first get the basic screens and then getting them to look nice.  
Anything that buys time here, is interesting.