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Buck wrote:
As for Joe's comments regarding keeping the logic that's in place, I can't
agree more.  Yes, it sure seems like a temptation to completely re-write and
start over (now that I'm so much smarter than I was - HA!)  But look at
Netscape: whilst they re-wrote their browser to fit in the constrained
memory model, Microsoft blew them apart in the marketplace.  Very few ISVs
are willing to go down the same road, which is why 'refactoring' has such
appeal.  I can also speak from the home-grown software side of the house,
having done that for 17 years.  My employers were completely unwilling to
spend an hour to re-write something that was working well enough.  If I had
to go into the code for other reasons, it was OK to re-factor, but extensive
re-work was frowned upon.  The last major code construction/development
effort was back in the days when we moved from card/batch processing to
workstation/transaction at a time processing.  And even then, many of the
'individual transactions' simply fed our old batch files.  It took years of
incremental improvements to become completely transaction oriented.

The point of this monotonous note is to try to explain what companies with
small budgets and small staffs go through when faced with a major technology
change.  I hope I was able to convey some of that...


The NetScape comparison is flawed for a lot of reasons: quickly changing technology, little income, a competitor with billions in its bank account. Ironically, now it is IE which is expected to remain stagnant for the next few years while other browsers are already providing better quality and innovation.


I can sympathise with the attitude "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". But at some point, any company may still come up against a competitor employing a different methodology, developing a product from scratch, that may well blow away yours. At some point, your code base may well be too brittle to easily respond to changing market conditions, where the easier response it to start from scratch. I suspect there's already an awful lot of RPG code in that particular boat, and the need to add a "webified" interface certainly isn't helping any.

My point is that a paradigm change may well be necessary for many shops. "Webifying" a tradional green-screen app (using whatever tool) may well give it a few more years of life. But in my (perhaps jaded and cynical) opinion, it's only delaying the inevitable.

Cheers! Hans



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