Re: EGL choice

Steve Mervosh wrote:

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.

Deployment for Rich UI is definitely different, and IBM keeps evolving it. Think of it as downloading an application to your web browser. What IBM is working on now is how to best manage that download.

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.

Here are two simple things off the bat that give EGL a heads up over any other web language:

Fixed decimal arithmetic. Any language without this is simply not a business language. Although it's rather embarassing that we had to wait so long for expressions in RPG, but I digress.

Bidirectional parameters. This is just so nice: to be able to get multiple pieces of data out of a function without having to create a data structure. You can try to emulate it with objects in other languages, but it's not the same as being able to pass a field and have a procedure update it.

I can go on and on, but nobody wants to hear me. <grin>

What REALLY irks me, though, is hearing someone complain about how you have to learn Java and Web App Servers to run EGL, when you can create an entire RUI application that doesn't generate a single line of Java or require anything more than an HTTP server.

Joe