Re: EGL vs. Java

Joe et al,

According to this announcement letter http://tinyurl.com/3dsly9, the
new replacement for RBDe is Rational Business Developer 7.1 and appears to
be a stand alone product that no longer requires RAD. Further, it appears
that the RDi - SOA product is just a software bundle that includes both the
RBD 7.1 and RDi V7.1 products.

A significant change to note with these new per seat developer tools is that
the maintenance will now be handled through Passport Advantage. From a cost
standpoint, this means that you will be paying 20% of the list price of each
seat per year for maintenance separate from and in addition to the normal
SWMA charge for your i5/OS and LPPs.
I recently received an invoice from IBM that included a $300/seat
maintenance charge from Passport Advantage for each of our RBDe 7.0 seats.

Joe, you were at the meeting and I wasn't so if you think I'm interpreting
this announcement letter incorrectly, I'll defer to you.

Regards,

BJ



On 1/30/08, Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

johnking@xxxxxxx wrote:

John, there is no RBDe anymore. At least not as far as System i
developers go (although now I have to admit I'm not sure how it works
with RAD, the non-System i Rational Application Developer). Anyway,
there will be RDi which will be priced roughly equivalently with ADTS,
the green-screen tools, on a per-seat basis. So basically, they've
unbundled SEU/PDM/SDA and then given you an option on whether you want
green screen or GUI tools. Your choice. I suspect that they may even
price ADTS a bit higher, as an incentive to get you to RDi.

But base RDi has NO web application development tools. Enough System i
customers have convinced IBM that there is a significant base of System
i users that have no interest in and will never move to web
development. And so, in order to keep a sort of parity, IBM now has in
effect created a GUI development suite for green screen developers. I
don't get it, but that's what the new announcement gives you. The good
news is that this suite is comparably priced to the old suite,
especially if you have few developers and don't need OPM compilers.

However, web development costs extra. I don't know if it's going to be
$1000 a seat or $2000 a seat. It could even be more, or less, but my
guess is somewhere in between (although that could just be wishful
thinking on my part). Anyway, for that, you get RDi-SOA, which includes
all the web development tools you saw in WDSC such as WDHT. More
importantly, it will include the EGL tooling as part of the package.

Hope that helps clear things up a bit.

Joe