Personally I've learned my lesson with languages - your mission critical
toolchain must be open source so you can survive any political decisions of
vendors
Truer words were never spoken! I think it obviously only applies to IBM's
modernization strategies over the last ten years though (i.e. IBM specific
Java tooling, Net.Data, VARPG, etc), because RPG is far from open source,
yet I don't think twice about using it because I know IBM would have to
first kill thousands of RPG programmers before they could ever put an EOL
(End Of Life) on the technology/language :-)
In a perfect world I would tell IBM to continue with WebFacing to get
immediate GUI for existing apps, and then I would ask them to put a modified
easy to use framework around the existing 5250 data stream that would allow
vendors and open source initiatives to develop event driven UI frameworks on
top of it. For example, if IBM made the UI framework interface open source
then I could write an Adobe Flex front end, or a XUL front end, or a
Microsoft Silverlight front end, or an HTML front end, or a thick client
front end, etc. The possibilities with that type of a framework would be
endless and would also keep shops from having to learn a second full fledged
language like EGL. And they could formulate the framework to work across
OSes so the AIX contingent could benefit from it also. The best part about
such a framework is everything still resides on the server which makes
deployment as simple as we have with RPG today.
Anyways, I digress.
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
midrange.com
