RE: The future of RPG (was DIM question). GUI ization

I don't believe anyone really knows at this point what the future of RPG
will be. However it is obvious that RPG is NOT going to go anywhere really
soon. It all boils down to a GUI front end. Users and clients WANT a GUI
front end. Screen scrapers provided a fairly decent start. I know our
clients loved our seagull product. Today we use ASNA's AVR for developing
our front ends and it works VERY well. I can still call RPG programs and
utlize some existing code, primarily batch programs but I do use some
sockets programs from the 400 and some 'work' programs. The Step from going
from RPG to the ASNA IDE was not very difficult for me even though my PC
programming skills were very neglible. ASNA's Caviar language is best
described as free format RPG. They have some excellent training and support
staff that helped my transition. ASNA is very expensive I will grant that
but its as STABLE as you can get from a Windows OS. IBM on the other hand
has not the slightest clue and the support for Websphere is non existent.
I'd be happy just to install it on XP. I have used IBMs Code/400 and
Distributed debugger for about 18 - 20 months now and I am VERY Happy with
it for my RPG development ( wish I could use it at home on XP), I just can't
stand the VARPG portion. anyway its monday and Im whining, thanks for
listening.