RE: MIDRANGE-L Digest, Vol 4, Issue 851

*shrug*  I have an iSeries payroll application I wrote that has few, if any
programs over 600 lines.  It is complete, and has run for 5 years now with
almost no modification. It ties into General Ledger and to Costing.  

I guess my point is that i would agree with you.  10,000 line programs are
just silly for anyone today, iSeries or otherwise. 


 
---------------------------------
Booth Martin
http://www.martinvt.com
---------------------------------
-------Original Message-------
 
From: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Date: 05/02/05 18:08:35
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: MIDRANGE-L Digest, Vol 4, Issue 851
 
Sorry, I have to report the opposite.
 
Our company several years ago dumped AS/400 based Payroll and Financials
because it took forever to get any changes done and went to a C# and SQL
based packages and I am astounded at the quality of these applications vs.
what I see on an AS/400, the most important one being that they actually
have normalized data base and they obviously have people who understand what
a data base is.
 
I have never seen an application package on the AS/400(and I have worked
with a lot) with a normalized database and every company I ever worked with
did not have one person working for the applications company who knew what
the hell a normalized data base was. One company had thousands of
programmers and I am not sure they even knew there was a data base on the
400.
 
The other part of it is that they have a fraction of the code in AS/400.
Almost all the code is written in SQL Stored Procedures and compared to the
bazillions of programs I see in the average AS/400 application package, they
have almost nothing and they have features why ahead of anything I have seen
on AS/400 packages.
 
My experience has been that if you look at the average AS/400 applications
package, you are going to find that half to 3/4 of the code is written to do
nothing except deal with database anomaly's. In contrast, every time I have
written a system with a normalized database, the amount of code to write is
small and clean.
 
I not saying the package is perfect. Just way ahead AS/400 products I have
seen.
 
Now the down side, it runs on Microsoft and that means you have one person
spending all her time dealing with instability of Microsoft products but I
guess you have to contrast that with having 3 or 4 full time AS/400
programmers maintaining and trying to enhance the AS/400 product. The
product itself is fine. The problem is the underlying Microsoft technologies
they have to rely on.
 
So my questions, why the hell can't we write an applications that clean on
the AS/400? We do we have to continue writing 10,000 line monolith programs
to deal with abnormal databases?
 
>> Message: 6
>> date: Mon, 2 May 2005 14:44:27 -0400
>> from: "Jim Hawkins" <jim.hawkins@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>> subject: RE: Left AS/400 and Returned
 
>> Several years ago a company I worked for moved their HR/Payroll
>> applications from an AS/400 to an Intel based application (GUI and
>> "security" were the reasons-course IT knows nothing).  9 months later we
>> moved back to the AS/400 based application.  The payroll clerk went from
>> taking most Friday's as a vacation day under the /400 solution (she had
>> been there forever) to working 70+ hours a week and no vacation time
under
>> the Intel based solution.  Data was constantly being lost by the system,
>> nothing ever tied out, the different PC's could never communicate with
the
>> server with the central database and processing payroll took at least
>> twice as long.  That's not to mention dedicating one IT team member about
>> half time to keep the application running. The AS/400 application had
very
>> little IT support required. Support for the Intel application was
>> horrible. A fix might break 10 other things and take 2-3 weeks to given
to
>> us. Help desk seemed to take their time returning calls.
>> The payroll clerk suffered from an infection shortly after the Intel
>> system.
 
 
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