AS/Set & 4GL curiosity

Al Macintyre at Tim PC

AS/436 405 CD - we do not have AS/Set & I have determined that some
requested mods, such as in ORD500 & ORD570 are out of the question without
it.

Our Evansville AS/400 User Group sponsored a demo of SeaGull's 4GL & it
struck a corporate nerve.

One of the reasons we went with 405 rather than V6 is that we are generally
more comfortable on green screen than on client server for most
applications, however some departments have a mixture of PC users & twinax
users in which at the department level they would like to have the choice of
this or that person doing their work for this or that BPCS program on twinax
or GUI, so the idea that some BPCS programs could go thru a 4GL into a GUI
version, without sacrificing the green screen version, has some appeal.

It did not dawn on me until the current issue of News/400 spotlight on
4GL/400, in which AS/Set did not make the lucky # cut, that SeaGull's JWalk
was a 4GL, like AS/Set, so it occurred to me that what SeaGull offers is
already available in AS/Set, if we had it.

Can AS/Set give choices of execution or programmer work on green screen
and/or GUI, or is some of it locked into only one possibility ... we quit
trying to install UserVision when it dawned on everyone that it was locked
into GUI with zero availability outside PCs, so we went strictly with
Query/400, for the mass of our add-on reports & inquiries.  Can AS/Set be
used by a green screen programmer and/or GUI programmer?  Can code in AS/Set
be told to generate to run on green screen and/or GUI?

Do the green screen & GUI versions have to have different names, or does the
compiled code automatically react to the connected devices like LANSA
recognizes what the AS/400 data stream is connected to & picks the right
interface?

Can AS/Set support a mixture of some code comes from AS/Set & some code is
native 3GL?

We have several islands of PC software, such as auto-cad, & prior-to-400
stuff that we need to integrate some day.  When looking at various articles
on what's available for them, I happen to notice some vendor names popping
up in multiple places, supporting 4GL on AS/400, and specific 4GL interfaces
for EDI, and good e-connections, and the real thing PDM.  I suspect that if
some non-BPCS applications at our company had the possibility of a good
handshake with a 4GL vendor product other than AS/Set, we would find that
different 4GL don't talk to each other real good.  Is that a fair bet?

There is no immediate plan to get anything at this time - I am just trying
to stay current on the literature, without accumulating too many
misconceptions.
____________________________________________
Al Macintyre
MacWheel99@aol.com
Central Industries of Indiana, Inc.
www.cen-elec.com
(812) 421-0231


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