>Is it at all possible always to get your core business on a single
platform?
It wouldn't be an easy task but I know it can be done in most cases.\001
And before you think I might be saying 100% RPG green screens I will head
that off and say we need to live in the reality of what people have in
their offices - Windows Desktops.\001 The conversation that has been going
on here about a thin render layer for a GUI has been on my thoughts for
about three or four years now ever since I had to develop a thin renderer
for a customer (on a different platform).\001 I realized that it took a
whole lot of upfront planning and wasn't very productive at first (i.e.
figuring how to go from one screen to the next, whether or not you should
"stack" screens so it was easy to simply go back up the stack without
asking the server to resend the form for the previous screen, what UI
components we wanted to tackle, what events would each UI component
facilitate, would each event go to a separate URL or a single 'router'
URL, etc).
It is something that takes a lot of alignment in your IT dept (i.e. if you
are an IT manager that believes in this approach but your CTO drinks
Kool-Aid all day then you will most likely fail).\001 In the same breath
if you are an IT manager that has developers that like to try out new
things then you have to be careful their "tests of technology" don't
interfere with the longterm viability of your core apps.\001 At my
previous employer I got all excited about Java because it had a nice
library of things that appeared to make things like web services and web
pages easier.\001 At the time it was a 99% RPG shop.\001 I decided, in my
idiot youth, that it would be an ok introduce Java to this shop and write
a portion of a core business process (tax calculation web service) with
Java+Tomcat.\001 Nevermind the fact that Brad Stone (e-RPG fame) was
literally sitting a cube away - I wanted to taste the Koolaid because
everything I read was that Java would be the next big thing and I didn't
at that time know how to accomplish the task with RPG.\001 Well, since
then I now get calls from my previous employer to fix that Java whenever
it breaks.\001 Java never took off within their walls and now it is just a
pain in their butt.\001 If I would have taken a measured approach and
evaluated what introducing Java+Tomcat would mean then I would have
realized that RPG would be a much better decision for the shop (and very
do-able).\001 It is all about making the right decision for each
individual shop based on what their core technologies are.
A lot of decisions happen to leave core business technologies like RPG
simply because the staff can't offer a solution that meets the current
business need (I have lived it and played the role of offender).\001
That's why educating yourself in best practices and patterns is very
important.\001 It's not enough to just know .NET or PHP or Java or RPG,
but within that language/platform what are the things you *should* be
adopting vs. the things you *want* to adopt.\001
As I understand from your past posts you are a fan of not being tied to a
vendor and prefer to find a happy medium by combining a bunch of open Java
technologies together even if it takes some manual plumbing on your part -
I would consider that NOT to be the norm but also consider it a direction
that more shops should take vs. switching languages/platforms just because
one single new part of technology makes something slightly easier.
One of the statements I make in the RPG related sessions I give at
conferences is this "There is very little RPG can't do."\001 The same
could be said for almost any language out there these days as long as the
developer holding the language isn't afraid to tread into the unknown.
Anyways, hope that gives you an idea of where I am coming from.
Now back to being "billable" :-)
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
p.s. Listening to The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus right now.\001 Check out song
"Face Down":
http://www.purevolume.com/theredjumpsuitapparatus
Thorbjo/rn Ravn Andersen wrote:
Aaron Bartell skrev:
the user/business needs. Most SOA and XML is a band-aid for the lack of
insight required to get your core business processes on a single
platform - just calling it like I see it. The first adopters of internal
Is it at all possible always to get your core business on a single platform?
I know that SOA is just yet another remote procedure call, and that XML
allows data to be "suspended" and moved around, but in my world stuff
tends to live on islands around the people who use it (otherwise you
introduce Network access to the number of things that can go wrong for
the user) and then it is impossible to merge them.
midrange.com
