If I were tasked with such a process, and had primarily an RPG development
staff, I would do the following:
Create a VB.NET (or C#.NET) thick client application that simply interacts
with a server side RPG program. All the VB.NET client knows how to do is
receive in an XML file containing the screen definition and dynamically
render based on the XML contents. Then for each "event" send the current
"form" up to the iSeries for the RPG program to decipher. The RPG program
would do some business logic and determine what next to display to the user
and send the next XML document down to the client and the client would
render appropriately.
I created the exact same thing except it was running on a Canon copier in
Java (with those big LCD displays) making XML requests back and forth to an
Apache server. The language on the server side was Perl.
Basically you would be doing something very similar to CGI programming
except you wouldn't have to deal with HTML and a browser. I was just
chatting on the midrangedotcom jabber forum with Lukas Beeler and his
company has done a very similar implementation to mine, except they used
.NET (which is what you are looking to do). Maybe rub shoulders with him to
see if you could get in touch with their programmers (Lukas is networking).
In the end, if RPG is your mainstay then you want to have as little
processing as possible in the .NET side otherwise it creates a headache to
debug (need two knowledge sets, read two people, to do any sort of
debugging).
In my mind this is what IBM should develop. Create a "designer" where you
can drag and drop components (i.e. text boxes, lists, etc) onto a form and
tie them back to an RPG program. The designer would create an XML
definition of that screen and based on that an RPG "controller" program
would be generated and compiled (100% RPG). The beautiful part is that RPG
is already setup for event based programming by way of procedure pointers.
So you could specify that a button named "submit_order" would execute a sub
procedure in an RPG program called ORD_SBM and have an agreed upon parm list
for event notifications. Really, if a vendor were to create such a
framework it would be a goldmine because there isn't something out there
(that I know of) where you can keep 99% of the programming in RPG, have a
GUI thick client, and NOT be tied to IBM's product support diarrhea (i.e.
VARPG going the way of the buffalo). Hey wait, I'm a vendor; maybe I should
create this :-)
HTH,
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [
mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of tim
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2007 11:16 AM
To: Rpg Forumn
Subject: What do I use?
Hello,
I will be creating a new system that will be GUI, no green screen, not
web-based.
I am trying to decide what to use. I primary work in RPG/ILE but also have
done extensive work with VB.NET and began playing with VARPG. I have version
7.0 of WDSC, but have little experience using it.
The new applications I will be writing will be using some java interfaces,
such as for credit card processing and such.
Thanks for your input.
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