Re: Help! Boss wants to know why ILE?

For ILE to really make sense, you have to think about your programs a little bit differently. You have to think in terms of small pieces, each one a reusable, independently testable/debuggable, black-box.

In a serious business application (a stock picking program, for example) written with the ILE mindset, you'll want to create 30 or 40 subprocedures, and control them from a main procedure. The business logic will be in a separate module from the display logic, and the database logic may also be separate.

Do you really want to write 40 separate non-ILE *PGM objects, and then try to maintain them?

Your boss is right... ILE doesn't provide anything you couldn't do before with program calls. You can write modular applications without ILE. ILE just makes them much, much, easier to write and maintain.

If you continue to use the old, monolithic, mindset... keep writing your 1000 line programs, etc... then ILE won't do you any good. You have to have a modular coding mindset for it to make sense.

Ask your boss the opposite question: If ILE provides the same capabilities, but makes them easier to write, and easier to maintain, then why keep doing things the old way?



DennisRootes@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Please help me come up with some good examples as to what makes ILE better than "business as usual". Here's what I've used so far:

1. It's faster - Rebuttal: doesn't matter we have plenty of cpu and our machine screams as it is.
2. Service program equals reusability - Rebuttal: we can just use a separate program for reusable code.
3. Local variables - Rebuttal: if they are inside a separate program it doesn't matter.
4. System maintenance - Rebuttal: instead of service programs or subprocedures we have separate pgms so it's the same thing.

It's not that the boss wants to stop us from using ILE, she just wants to know what makes it so much better than plain 'ol RPG IV that she should invest the man hours it's going to take to bring our whole dept up to speed on ILE. And I just am not coming up with anything that's very convincing.

So please, if you have any good arguments, let me know.

Thanks,

Dennis