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

john e wrote:

Because EGL (and browser apps in general) is client/server. That means it can only be used for new apps. Our existing apps are all monolithic, and in fact are the client (where the terminal is the server). It is too much of an investment to re-build these apps because we have to factor out all business logic so that it can be called from the server. In practice, this is impossible. Not impossible, but very expensive and risky. So it's not going to happen. Because if this was an option it already happened with for example the ASNA products or whatever.

This will be my last comment on this, because once again we wander into the land of opinions. But to me, the thing that is most holding companies back from the future is the desire to hold on to monolithic application design. Things like screen scrapers are horrible solutions, because they neither provide a good interface nor move you towards a proper architecture. Even my own tool, PSC/400, was designed to be a stepping stone to the next level.

What we REALLY need is a technology so we can put a nice GUI on our EXISTING apps. And this is possible, but we need a new technlogy for this. One which merges the event-driven approach of GUI with the host-driven approach we use today with 5250. So we can take our existing app, simple replace the EXFMT with a EXDIALOG (which presents a nice looking windows MODAL screen). And so we can EXTEND our monolithic apps with event-driven functionality if that's what the user wants.

Have you tried EGL? You can create wonderful modal applications just as quickly as you can with SDA, even quicker. The hard part of this whole process is not the user interface, it's rewriting the business logic so that it is server-based. If you do that, you immediately have access to all manner of sophisticated architectures, from web services to rich clients. If you don't, you will be forever doomed to trying to write 5250 in a browser.

But instead, IBM gives us..... EGL!

Yes!

Joe