Re: EGL and RPG - The Fastest Path to the Future

Aaron Bartell wrote:

I am not trying to start a heated debate, but isn't this second best?

Wow, no Aaron, it's not. It's absolutely the best way to develop applications. In most of my reading, the idea of distributed or collaborative development is pretty much the Nirvana of application design. If I read you right, you're advocating the old school of architecture where one person owns the application from user interface to database design.

Why
should I need two completely different people (read knowledge sets) involved
to create a single business application?

I don't. I could have done it myself, if I wrote the rich client part. I mean, it's just EGL. But at the same time, the division of labor - allowing different programmers to focus on different tasks - has long been recognized as a productivity enhancement. In this particular instance, I didn't have to worry about images or CSS or the iPhone - I just wrote business logic.

Seems like we are going backward in efficiency.

Nope. Disagree. I showed that when I responded to Nathan's application. I put together a nice little screen in minutes. It was actually easier to do then it would have been with SDA, since EGL painted not only the fields but also the prompts.

If that is the case I would say the technology has become
too complicated to quickly/effectively build business applications.

Well, I think a lot of people would agree that technology has gone past the day when one person could easily run an IT shop. But that's a primary argument *for* EGL - you can write all the interfaces (thick, thin, even 5250) with EGL, and all your business logic in RPG. One person can still run the shop.

Again, I understand your desire for a single UI that runs from RPG, but we don't have one, Aaron. So until we do, what do you suggest developers do?

Wait?

I guess
this points back to my opinion that people will find greater efficiency by
dropping RPG if EGL is the facing language because they have one knowledge
set to maintain.

Fair question?

No, not fair at all. We've always used a couple of different languages. We use DDS and CL and RPG. Thiis argument that EGL will force RPG out has no basis in fact. I mean, it's your opinion, but it seems awfully far fetched and it's a terrible, terrible reason to try to keep EGL out of the hands of developers. I mean, if you don't want to use EGL, fine. but don't badmouth it because you think it's going to displace RPG. Heck, Microsoft's been trying for decades, and they still haven't done it.

Joe