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

Doug,

I know you asked Joe, forgive me for butting in.....

This is clearly one of the biggest issues facing "active" developers: Simply keeping up with all the new technologies coming out and trying to evaluate them while trying to keep up with "feeding the family" with bread and butter projects. I am experiencing that with EGL at the moment. I am deep into a project I started over a year ago. The project is a Java servlet project and is quite complex. The difficult business logic portion is just about done but I still have many simple CRUD applications I need to write to populate the various tables. Meanwhile I continue to write new and modify existing RPG programs in RPG ILE which I am still getting fully up to speed on. I am also learning Ruby on Rails and I do a smattering of PHP development. I plan to use EGL on the simple CRUD applications, not because it is EGL's strength, but because it will get me started to using EGL more fully.

There is no easy solution. I made the sacrifice of about 30 hours of my time over three weeks to get established in the basics of EGL (the free courses are amazing!). My approach is to use EGL on new projects that are simple (initially) and then grow into more complex ones as I become (hopefully) more proficient. But, just like learning WDSC, I had to make the commitment and then seek opportunities to keep the commitment. Not easy.

My son, before headed down the technology path himself (in network security), asked me what I find to be the biggest challenge in my job and what was the greatest reward. In response to both facets I told him "Constantly learning new things". It's a love/hate relationship that is tough to maintain but one I find very rewarding, even at 53 years of age (geezer!)

If you get started and then exceed the demo period, you might be able to uninstall and re-install, but I don't know that for a fact. I highly recommend the online instructor led courses that are available when you do decide to begin, and I'd plan the installation around the dates of the course. You may find it productive enough to warrant purchasing the product, which is what I did, which will add some incentive to use it ;-)

Pete

DBelcher@xxxxxxxx wrote:

Joe,

I have been following the messages about EGL for a while now and I would love to try and learn it, however there are several roadblocks. First of all I have to continue to focus on production issues, that means RPG III (old ERP, don't ask), second I have to be working on new project work for the immediate future, that means Excel, SharePoint, and Informatica. That last point sucks up a lot of time because I'm in the process of learning them while I have a project deadline for each. After all that is done is when I get to spend what little downtime I have to investigating new technologies for use in our shop (not assigned work, that's just what I do). If I download all the bits and pieces I need to try out EGL I will guarantee you that it will take me a couple of weeks to get back to it for the next phase. With a 90 day window that means I have to get a bigger chunk of time to devote to learning it prior to me even starting it so that means it get pushed even farther int!
o the future.

I'm not complaining, I'm just saying that if I can't get started on something because I'm going to run out of a demo period, especially for a product that I'm going to have to justify some cost for later, it just makes it harder to do.

Suggestions?

Douglas Belcher
KV Pharmaceutical
St Louis, MO
Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer

-----Original Message-----
From: egl-i-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:egl-i-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Joe Pluta
Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 9:26 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion; RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries; EGL on and around the IBM i
Subject: [EGL-i] EGL and RPG - The Fastest Path to the Future

There's been some discussion both on and off the list about what EGL
bodes for the future of the platform and specifically RPG. I've been
pretty clear in my opinion that EGL may be the best thing to happen to
RPG since the display file, but I've heard a lot of muttering that "IBM
is going to kill RPG".

To find the truth, you have to recognize that IBM isn't a single
monolithic entity. While there is definitely a segment of the EGL team
that believes EGL can do anything RPG can do, another segment
understands full well that there are billions of lines of RPG code out
there - the last thing I read was that we're actually *adding* four
billion lines a year - and that a fundamental requirement of efficient
modernization involves taking advantage of that legacy code... and those
legacy programmers!

If you'd like to see a discussion of this issue that falls more in line
with this view of modernization, go here:

http://www.ibmsystemsmag.com/i5/february08/qa/19749p1.aspx

Joe
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