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Nathan,
To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Jarman did not give out copies of his
slides to anyone at the conference.
I would've had better coverage myself, except that he kept droning on
about things that were irrelevant to my life and I was running out of
tape in my camcorder... I didn't know the point at which he was going
to suddenly jump into Open I/O... if I had known, I would've done a much
better job capturing it.
Ian actually didn't spend much time on it (to my frustration), so I
don't know how useful his slides would be to you, anyway.
Like all RPG enhancements, you can count on the fact that it won't break
any backward compatibility. Your existing files will continue to work
the way they always have.
The enhancement basically lets you write "handlers" that are routines
that get run when a setll/chainread/write/update/delete is done to a
file. It's very similar to the existing SPECIAL file support, except
that it will externally defined files, and can use ILE concepts (i.e.
call procedures in a service program) in addition to calling a program.
The expectation is that people will use this support to write code that
interfaces RPG with modern devices like browsers, iPhones (and other
phones), etc, and that it'll be usable as an ordinary file object from
RPG, so no special knowledge is needed to call it.
Personally, I visualize it much like the Windows support for printer
drivers. If you make a printer and want it to be used from Windows, you
write software (a driver) that contains the code to interface between
Windows GDI and the language the printer uses. Therefore, all programs
can write to GDI, and take advantage of your printer.
RPG Open I/O gives that capability to RPG programs. It provides support
wherein you you can write a "driver" (if you follow me) that will be
invoked when using record i/o operations. So an RPG programmer can take
advantage of your particular device (or I/O method of some sort) just by
interacting with it as a regular file.
Hope that makes sense.
Nathan Andelin wrote:
Ian Jarman evidently announced this at the RPG & DB 2 Summit last week, and details are still sketchy, but it appears that this could unleash development of several new types of IBM i applications.
I happened to come across the announcement at http://www.itjungle.com, which referred to a video produced by Scott Klement and published at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_SRCYgr9cA&feature=related (beginning late in the video at segment 7:40) - Jon Paris and Susan Gantner also referenced Open I/O in their blog at http://ibmsystemsmag.blogs.com/idevelop/2009/10/memories.html ...
Did attendees receive a copy of Ian's slides? If so, I wonder if anyone would be good enough to post a hyperlink to the slide which introduced Open I/O? It was barely visible in Scott's video.
I gather that RPG programmers will still be able to reference display files and record formats via "F" specs and Read/Write opcodes, but have custom I/O handlers intercept the I/O just prior to the point where the 5250 data stream would be generated or parsed ...
The ultimate goal would be to enable native applications to more easily interface with more types of clients - browsers & so forth ...
-Nathan.
midrange.com
