Re: *** ADMIN: New moderator / list owner -- JAVA400-L




David said:

I'm very pleased to announce that the job of Moderator and list owner
for the JAVA400-L Mailing list is being passed to Joe Pluta.

In recent months the JAVA400 mailing list has languashed from lack of
attention on my part.   I decided that what it really needed was a
JAVA/AS400 advocate... Joe Pluta combines both those attributes in
spades.

---------

Thanks for the endorsement, David!

I thought I would say hello.  As David pointed out, my name is Joe Pluta.  I'm
also known (for a long and convoluted reason) as Zappie; my website is
www.zappie.net, and I hope you'll all come visit.

My goal is simple: to make Java accessible to AS/400 programmers.  I tout my
website as "the place where the AS/400 speaks Java with an RPG accent".  You may
have noticed my posts about JDB/400 and JBUI - free packages designed to allow
people with AS/400 programming skills develop GUI programs in Java, using
techniques familiar to RPG programmers.  As the summer progresses, you'll see
more and more of those packages from me.

Why am I doing this?  Well, part of me does it because, well, because it's
there.  I finally have a graphical language I feel comfortable with, and I want
it to work with the best database machine in existence (yeah, I'm an AS/400
bigot - so sue me <grin>).  But while I've got a lot of years of OOP background,
many of us don't.  Alot of darned good programmers come from S/3 backgrounds and
have never written a line of code on a PC.  And while that was fine until fairly
recently, it's not going to be the case in the new millenium.  Those of us who
have the business knowledge, the application expertise, the industry savvy, are
in danger of being pushed aside by people who can paint pretty screens on the
Internet.  We can't let that happen.  Instead, we need to share our common
wisdom and pull each other up by our collective bootstraps, and make sure our
voices are heard.

But in order to do that, we need to equip ourselves with the tools to do the
job.  And to my mind, Java is one of those tools.  It's the graphical piece the
AS/400 has been lacking for so long.  With Java, we can write a client once and
run it on any platform.  With good, solid server design, we can use the AS/400
as the central repository of business rules and persistent data in a widespread
computing network.

Unfortunately, we can't learn Java overnight.  As even major software vendors
are finding out, the move to Java is not one to be taken lightly.  And most of
us have real jobs, where we can't afford to just disappear for three or four
months learning an entirely different paradigm.  Instead, if we want to use Jave
we have to learn it on our own, at least until we can make it useful.

My goal is for all of us to learn the basics of Java, then to begin to apply
those to redploying our existing code, taking advantage of as much legacy code
as possible.  Then we can begin a strategy of systematically eliminating the bad
stuff and replacing it with OOP, a little at a time.

I have no definite goals in mind, other than to learn.  I hope you'll join me.

Joe "Zappie" Pluta
www.zappie.net/java
where the AS/400 speaks Java with an RPG accent


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