Re: IBM i GUI Frameworks

Nathan Andelin wrote:

From: Joe Pluta
To that end, anything that extends the 5250 interface is purely tactical, not strategic.

Is this purely coincidental, or are you following the discussion on the AS/400 Professionals Group on LinkedIn? In that discussion, Stuart Milligan asserts the following:

"All the emulation solutions in the world and ROA do nothing to redress this real problem. I also hear and see so called industry leaders/pundits talk about emulation/refacing as the first step in modernization. What a lot of nonsense, its a blind alley that produces nothing beyond tactical user pacification. Adding technology and complexity layers to these already messy and brittle legacy applications may have tactical benefit in some instances, but strategically its irresponsible. I think there is a lot of misleading so called thought leadership around on IBM i that is almost certainly contributing to the demise of the platform."

I personally think that ROA has a lot of potential, but at this point I'm not sure how to respond. His other assertions are strong, clearly stated, logical, and directed at the vendors and proponents of ROA.

Purely coincidental, Nathan. But it's interesting, since Stuart and I come at this from almost diametrically opposite positions. Without commenting on their efficacy since I haven't used them, the X-Analysis tools are intended to execute the ultimate in what I would consider "proper" modernization (extracting business rules and then repurposing them for UI independent development). Or at least, that's how I see it. And regardless of any bias towards those tools, Stuart is one of the experts in that particular feat, especially for the i community.

I, on the other hand, have to be considered one of the pioneers in the other end of the spectrum, taking an existing 5250 application and making it web based. I did RPG OA before RPG OA was cool <grin>. My PSC/400 tool (still in production today) modified programs to pass data structures to external programs a decade ago. I had to do it the hard way - I had to modify the source to call a program and pass a data structure and then update all the fields in the calling program appropriately (including indicators and informational data structures and the like). But no matter how primitive that particular technique is, I am pretty much the expert in how it works. Heck, I literally wrote the book on it, almost exactly 10 years ago!

(P.S. Anybody saying they can easily convert a subfile program into a web program using RPG OA is smoking something - just handling READC is a nightmare, not to mention a whole lot of other things.)

So it's probably worth noting that even though Stuart and I come at this from entirely different viewpoints, we've come to the same conclusion: refacing is a tactical option at best (I'm at least a little more tactful about it, I think <grin>).

Joe