How is IBM copying Microsoft?
Developer tools and distributed architectures. Eclipse and Visual Studio are quite comparable feature wise. JSF is patterned after Microsoft's Web Forms architecture. The tool palette in EGL is quite comparable to the one in Visual Studio. It's all centered around point & click, drag & drop software development. Placing a component on a form causes a lot of client-side as well as server-side code to be generated. The tools are very similar.
The runtime environments are quite comparable too, but in that case Microsoft was the copycat. Microsoft patterned their application servers after J2EE architecture. Microsoft also followed IBM's lead and bet the farm on OO languages and tools.
IBM
is pushing Linux and J2EE,and basically preaching platform >agnosticism...
I agree, but how is that relevant to the traditional System i customer base?
If you're calling EGL legos, you're way off base, Nathan.
EGL is not
legos.
You call it plumbing. I call it Legos. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Legos is a successful product. It appeals to a certain mindset. Like Legos, EGL gives you a set of pre-fabricated parts that have well defined attributes and behaviors. You can do a lot of useful things with EGL's component library and building anything with them is intuitive - like Legos.
On the other hand I'd say that Legos and EGL are too intuitive; too well defined. Like Legos, if you try to bend EGL's components in a way that they weren't designed to do, they break.
EGL is primarily about the plumbing, which you're not even
addressing.
How much work is it for you to attach a validation
table to a field and
have the browser pop up an error next to the
field if the entered value is not
in the table?
It's very easy for me to do that, but I'm going to steer clear of the question because my purpose in responding to this thread is not to promote my tools.
Remember: EGL does not dictate the look and feel of your
application.
It simply provides a quick way to drop dynamic data
onto the page, and you
can then go from there wherever your
imagination takes you.
I hear the same thing from .Net developers, but they're not what I'd consider very imaginative. The default templates and components that come in the box become their world.
I just finished an article for IBM System Magazine where I took
a DB2 physical file of orders and then created both a simple CRUD
application
over it to enter data as well as a quick query application
that displayed
the detail data in a table and summarized the data
in a pie chart. Total elapsed time? 15 minutes. As generated it's
indeed pretty cookie cutter ("lego" if you will), but
what else could
it be?
Well, if you're happy with that type of user interface, then what can I say? You can get an essentially comparable user interface from a lot of application generators from various vendors including Computer Associates, Lansa, BCD, Profound Logic, Planet J, and others.
Nathan.
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