× The internal search function is temporarily non-functional. The current search engine is no longer viable and we are researching alternatives.
As a stop gap measure, we are using Google's custom search engine service.
If you know of an easy to use, open source, search engine ... please contact support@midrange.com.



I've been banging the EGL drum for a while now, primarily because I see how incredibly powerful it is. And recently I made a couple of comments about a project I've been working on where I was writing back-end business logic in RPG and exposing it as web services using EGL. Meanwhile, someone else was writing a rich client UI for those same servers, again using EGL.

I got some grief for this, but I think if you saw what can be done, you would agree that it's light years ahead of anything else. I'm not talking about putting lipstick on the 5250 pig (and I;m not demeaning the idea, after all I have a product that does it quite well) but instead I'm giving developers a way to get to the next level - RPG business logic with powerful, graphical user interfaces that are media-independent.

It's time, then, to show it off. Please go to http://www.laffra.com at your convenience to take a look at the live scheduling application that will be running at the Rational Software Developers Conference in June. Chris Laffra and I wrote the whole thing in our spare time. There are currently about two dozens web services, which Chris and I designed on the fly as our needs expanded. In just a few weeks we added Web 2.0 features -- voting, tagging, even realtime chat -- all sorts of capabilities to what started out as just a simple scheduling app.

And it runs on an iPhone.

Technically this particular application is a web application, but I don't want you to pigeonhole the architecture. On my LAN I get subsecond (heck, nearly instantaneous) response time, so it would be perfectly acceptable to use this as the interface for a local application. It is in fact a perfect architecture for a thin client installation - cheap terminals with powerful graphical interfaces loaded from a central server.

Please realize the first download takes a little while. It's a big app, and it's running through a little pipe, especially if you run off of my WebSphere instance. Oh, did I mention that it's dually deployed? It's running both off a hosted PHP server running a LAMP stack, and also off my machine running WebSphere. All back-end logic is done using RPG on a model 270.

The entire application is a few thousand lines of code, distributed between client-side EGL (Chris' stuff) and RPG business logic, with just a couple hundred lines of EGL to expose the RPG servers. It took about three weeks of the spare time of two people.

This is the benchmark, then. If anybody would like to write a comparable application, then we can compare the approaches.

Joe Pluta
http://www.plutabrothers.com

EGL puts the i in iPhone.


As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

This thread ...

Follow-Ups:

Follow On AppleNews
Return to Archive home page | Return to MIDRANGE.COM home page

This mailing list archive is Copyright 1997-2024 by midrange.com and David Gibbs as a compilation work. Use of the archive is restricted to research of a business or technical nature. Any other uses are prohibited. Full details are available on our policy page. If you have questions about this, please contact [javascript protected email address].

Operating expenses for this site are earned using the Amazon Associate program and Google Adsense.