EGL choice

Joe (Pluta), thanks for your support, advice, and assistance with EGL. I appreciate reading about your experiences & recommendations with it. I'm about 1/3 of the way through the Rich UI EGL course. I'm kind of wishing they had covered some deployment issues, differences between Rich UI and JSF EGL variants, project maintainability up front early in the course. Hoping it is covered later on, but those concerns are bouncing around my head as I progress through the course. Admin/maintain/build things that I knew how to do with EGL JSF, I'm not seeing in the portion of the course I've been through thus far - kind of jumps quickly into "Hello World" stuff without some big picture items. And the step mode debugger didn't work the way I expected in the event handler functions. I was expecting to see the UI updated immediately after particular lines of code, but the UI updates didn't seem to occur until the event handler function returned control. Like you mentioned, it is the first release, and it shows promise.

Frankly, I'm not interested in RPG migration to EGL concerns. I chose EGL for a string of four substantial internal IBM projects after evaluating PHP, Java, JavaScript, JSF/SDO using WDSC tooling. The only one that gave me something that I thought could be easily maintained over several years by whichever programmers followed me, was EGL. There was a very good tutorial/lab in the RAD/RBD help system that sold the deal for me.

I just figured out what the existing to-be-replaced Java client GUI was doing with SQL & tables, and wrote the EGL from scratch to implement the existing SQL/DB access flow. The first project is a case study on the EGL Cafe. Of course, I didn't have to pay for RAD/RBD like a real customer, and I might have had a better hotline into Jon Sayles, but knowing Jon, I think he gives great service to everyone (internal IBM or external).

The EGL project was indeed easily understandable & maintainable. So much so that IBM resourced me figuring the others could pick it up OK when enhancements are needed. I only had to spend about a week on transition documentation and training to the remaining guys with no EGL and limited WebSphere background. Not sure that's the best product testimonial. If I had done the project in JavaScript, I probably would have had job security.