Re: EGL: Integration or Migration?

Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"For your company, would it be more important that IBM focus on
providing tools that allow EGL to act as a thin interface to your
existing ILE, or are you more interested in using EGL to write brand new platform-independent applications?"

Joe,

I fall into the "little bit of both" camp. While currently employing
RBD/EGL as my "SDA for the Web", I'm increasingly questioning whether
EGL could/should be used as the single development language for
business apps. Although it's not RPG, isn't this what Aaron is asking
for; a single business application development language that allows
modern interfaces to IBM i data? Most i folks will take up RBD/EGL for
integration initially, but I think after using the product some may
well start to question the validity of migration. With the benefit of
deploying the same code base to multiple platforms by just modifying a
build descriptor, ISVs will surely be making this assessment.

The question that needs to be answered is what does RPG provide the
business application developer that's not available in EGL? With its
CHAIN, READ, UPDATE and WRITE opcodes, RPG has tight integration with
the database whereas EGL uses SQL for its data access but other than
for random access to a single row, is this really a drawback?
What would be on your top ten list of RPG features that aren't
available in EGL? How probable is it that the EGL development team
could/would address these missing features?

Kind regards,
BJ