RE: MODERATOR ALERT

Joe P., you said:

>"Anyway, I'd be interested to hear if anyone has some ideas on how we
>might be able to better address this issue of OO and business
>programming.  As I said, it's my position that it sucks, and I base that
>on a lot of years of programming.  But if I'm wrong, I'd love to see it.
>Maybe we can start an Open Source project on creating a small,
>functional business application, and we can compare and contrast the RPG
>and Java versions."

Well I happen to think that this is a really interesting issue, especially 
is there is solid proof one way or the other. Maybe there is a certain 
category of coding/computer language that is "better" for one thing than 
another. Certainly I wouldn't want to write an OS in COBOL, but I also 
don't much like generating reports with C, either. So here's my question 
for you and anyone else interested:

Precisely what constitutes "business programming," and what would be 
acceptable proof, one way or the other? What is a real OO solution and 
what is a true functional/procedural solution? Where and why is one more 
appropriate than the other, or is it just a matter of taste or what you're 
comfortable with? You know, is it science or is it craft? These are such 
fundamental issues to so many people that I think it would be of real 
interest to a lot of designers and architects. Let's not kill ourselves 
trying to define the whole world of business application programming, but 
maybe like the TP-C DBMS benchmarks, someone, or a group of us could come 
up with a set of fairly typical operations and transactions. Design and 
code these in RPG, COBOL, Java, C++, etc. and discuss them. Like real 
newsgroup/mailing lists used to do in the "olden days" of the '80's & 
'90's. Who knows, this might actually lead to something somewhere, maybe 
even a class or a book.

Hell we could probably even have someone with no life blog this somewhere! 



Jeff Furgal