RE: Free OS/400

> It would be neat if someone were providing an integrated client and server
GUI environment.  No one really is yet.

And this, folks, would be the REAL plum of an open source type of project.
Not the little quibbles about whether e-RPG or HTTP or data queues is the
way to support a GUI.  Heck, you should be able to CHOOSE which one of those
you want.  Instead, we should be developing an "application definition
language" that allows us to dynamically design an n-tier application without
worrying about the plumbing details.

<APPLICATION name="OrderStatusInquiry">

<PANEL name="CustomerPanel">
  <FIELD name="customer" prompt="Customer number"/>
  <ACTION choice=03 prompt="exit">
</PANEL>

<TRANSACTION name=getStatusForCustomer>
  <REQUEST>
    <FIELD name="customer" validate="Lookup(CUSTFILE)"/>
  </REQUEST>
  <RESPONSE>
    <SET maxOccurence=20>
      <FIELD name="orderNumber" drillable sortable/>
      <FIELD name="orderDate" sortable edit=*date/>
      <FIELD name="status"/>
    </SET>
  <RESPONSE>
</TRANSACTION>

<PANEL name="OrderPanel">
  <TABLE>
    <FIELD option heading="opt">
    <FIELD name="orderNumber" heading="Order" drillable sortable/>
    <FIELD name="orderDate" heading="Date" sortable edit=*date/>
    <FIELD name="status" heading="status"/>
    <OPTION choice=02 panel="OrderEdit" parms="customer, orderNumber">
    <OPTION choice=03 panel="OrderCopy" parms="customer, orderNumber">
  </TABLE>
  <ACTION choice=03 prompt="exit">
</PANEL>

</APPLICATION>

How the rest of the panel is fleshed out it is sort of inconsequential.  You
could have a corporate standard that does most of the work, or on the other
end of the spectrum you could feed the definitions into a WYSIWYG editor
that you can then use to finish off the UI design.  Or you could have a
combination of both, a skeleton with the ability to pretty up the
presentation.

The server side would be similar.  You could have a corporate standard that
generates RPG code, or COBOL code, or even SQL stored procedures.  The end
result is not the hard part; the hard part is a standardized definition that
we can then use regardless of the architectural design we choose.

This, to my mind, is the direction we need to start thinking.  Rather than
spending a whole lot of time on which GUI is the best, I think we need to
really decide what we want our next generation of application development
tools to look like.  And some fancy GUI designer with a bunch of SQL wizards
is not the way to go.

IMHO.

Joe

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