On 4/20/2010 3:04 PM, David Gibbs wrote:
Over engineered? Over complicated? Not from my perspective. It's a
pretty straight forward mechanism for calling host programs using
structured parameters.
Yes, it's great for calling RPG from Java. But (and I probably didn't
make this clear) I thought we were talking about it from the perspective
of making the RPG language into an OO language. In which case, it'd be
used as a mechanism so that RPG callers (which in that paradigm would be
95% of the calls) didn't need to have a separate prototype.
This would mean that the RPG compiler would essentially have to convert
from PCML to RPG prototype format for every single procedure in every
single module. Horribly inefficient way to provide that functionality.
Therefore, I suggest a binary mechanism (which is what Java has, BTW!)
that doesn't involve the overhead of parsing a complex XML.
Not only that, but PCML is grossly lacking in the features that would be
needed for RPG to use it to call RPG procedures. All of the RPG
keywords would have to be available... and is that really desirable in
PCML?
By all means, provide the XML (PCML) format for Java to call RPG. But
it's grossly overcomplicated for regular routine heavy use in RPG
calling RPG.
How does this make things faster? You'll have to connect to the
system with the program information first to determine the parameter
structure which is probably a lot slower than parsing XML once ...
and ...
I don't follow this... connect to the system with the information? Are
we still talking about making RPG OO, or are you talking about client
server programming (waaaaay far away from what I was talking about)
Plus... if PCML is embedded in the RPG object, don't you still have to
connect to the system to get it?
You can serialize the XML to a file so the it doesn't have to be re-parsed every time.
You'd still need some way of detecting changes and getting the updated
copy, and that'd still involve connecting to the system, right?
But since we're talking about the RPG compiler, here... and unless
we've made further hypothetical changes that I've missed (such as
allowing the interconnectivity of modules on separate systems)
connecting to another system is a non-issue.
So why not keep the data in the format that the compiler needs it in
instead of XML?
midrange.com
