Re: BPCS ECM & AS/SET -- BPCS-L

jesse.salazar@trin.net writes:

> 1)  What are the advantages/disadvantages of AS/SET over traditional RPG?

I will answer this one, as a person who modifies BPCS programs in RPG that 
were created by AS/SET & does not currently work with AS/Set & never learned 
it.

You might also check the archives for past discussions of this topic
http://archive.midrange.com/bpcs-l/index.htm

If you are on V6 you do not have much choice in the matter.

At version V405 we have the RPG source that is generated by AS/Set, and the 
choice of modifying by buying & using As/Set, which does not come with the 
basic SSA pricing package, or modifying the RPG programs that AS/Set created.

Depending on what people need modified, a company can do quite well without 
investing in the extra fees SSA charges for having AS/Set.  In our case, the 
vast majority of modifications are new reports & inquiries off of the BPCS 
data base, so it is extremely useful to have access to BPCS source code for 
standard access to various relationships.

At version V6, SSA does not supply the RPG source, just the AS/Set, so the 
only way you can modify stuff is by going through AS/Set.

Advantage of AS/Set over RPG is that it is like a baby CASE
You do not have the full power of CASE but you have some of that CASE

A programmer of X productivity & competence in RPG when armed with AS/SET 
becomes somewhere between 2X & 10X in amount of productive work that gets 
done for the company employer in the same amount of time & effort

A programmer who already knows RPG CL DDS etc. can learn AS/Set in a few 
weeks - there is a learning curve, but the distance to go is nowhere like the 
distance we had to go to learn RPG CL DDS etc.  I have not yet learned REXX 
UIM & some others that I suspect might not be needed if I learn AS/Set.

Disadvantage is that it becomes possible for programmers using AS/Set to 
produce programs that are massively in violation of any standards of 
reasonableness for using end platform properly with modern theories of how 
software should be written.

In my opinion, in the life of a program, a whole lot more time is spent 
dreaming up ways to improve it & how best to implement those changes, than 
how long it took to create it in the first place, so it is critical to have 
good internal documentation, and structure that will help future 
modifications.  

It seems too easy for AS/Set to create programs which do not have this in 
their RPG  source.

Is my employer better off because I produce code that is internally 
documented good, and runs efficiently on the 400 resources so we do not have 
to buy more hardware to get the job done right?

Or would they be better off if they replaced me with an AS/Set programmer 
that produces much much more software, that requires more 400 hardware to get 
the job done, and have a much higher rate of modifications implemented?

This may be a moot point, because in our last review the conclusion was that 
we need to focus more on our people using the exisiting software more 
productively, but I ask the question to help you evaluate advantages & 
disadvantages of AS/Set.

I have had to turn down requests from my users for modifications to ORD500 & 
others because we are dealing here with a program that has over 1,000 pages 
of source code & calls a dozen other programs of similar size & every other 
line is using a literal that I have to look up some place else & I cannot do 
a search on the fields they want changed because the values are soft coded.  
I do not want to spend years figuring out what would be a five minute job on 
a program not created by As/Set.

But I can see that AS/Set makes practical some humongous applications that 
might be a nightmare to produce without any comparable CASE-like tool.

When trying to debug why ZERO times ONE equalls NEGATIVE TWO in several BPCS 
programs, I find a systemic problem with field sizes in excess of IBM 
reccommendations, like no one at SSA has ever read the RPG manual, but then 
with AS/Set you do not have to, so I do not know if this is a flaw in the 
AS/Set guidelines, or why SSA programmers would be doing this all over the 
place ... I suspect that by divorcing AS/Set from the nitty gritty detail of 
programming realities, it is also divorcing AS/Set users from stuff you 
should not be doing, that can lead to bad results, poor hardware performance, 
inefficient use of disk space, etc.

Of course I have the advantage of having taken the AS/400 administrative 
classes in addition to the pure programming classes, so I can see how 
programming techniques can translate into efficient code for the 400.  I do 
not know if AS/Set developers have same kind of platform exposure that RPG 
programmers can be exposed to.

I recognize that for SSA GT the rules are to write code that WORKS on the 400 
& NT & UNIX, not that it works GOOD, and down the road they might add LINUX 
to the target platforms, the goal being to broaden the base of revenue not to 
be particularly competitive in any one platform.

A disadvantage to a company putting your programmer training dollars in 
AS/Set is that AS/Set is not marketed outside of SSA using it on BPCS, so if 
at some future time SSA GT hitches its profit wagon to some other CASE tool 
... that would be normal practice for SSA & once again SSA makes big bucks 
from some product then abandons it to seek another money maker. 

If AS/Set had a computing identity outside of being used on BPCS, then there 
would be a stronger arguement in support of a BPCS using company selecting 
this tool.

Consider the need of many companies to improve their handshake between legacy 
BPCS data & e-commerce.  There are several approaches that do an excellent 
job of delivering REAL e-BPCS ... which of them work with AS/Set as an 
integral part of that picture?

Again, my perspective will be understandably flawed because my employer 
decided not to get AS/Set for what seemed to be logical reasons at the time.  
So I am an outsider to As/Set with a distorted perspective.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)
AS/400 Data Manager & Programmer for BPCS 405 CD Rel-02 mixed mode (twinax 
interactive & batch) @ http://www.cen-elec.com Central Industries of 
Indiana--->Quality manufacturer of wire harnesses and electrical 
sub-assemblies - fax # 812-424-6838

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