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Hi David. I think you've made some good choices going forward and have the skills you need to make it all work. That said... 1) MANY iSeries developers don't have your current skill sets or anything close.. 2) I've been teaching my own iSeries Java development courses for over 5 years ( longer than IBM has ..). 3) A high percentage of existing RPG developers don't have any web skills. Learning HTML, Java, Javascript, JSPs, servlets, Struts, Tomcat, WebSphere is not a reasonable starting point. Worse, many businesses have limited resources and more immediate needs so they need to see rapid payback on education investments and e-business investments. 4) Therefore the traditional Java web education model doesn't work well for most of these iSeries companies... 5) My focus is delivering basic Java web applications rapidly while MINIMIZING the total startup time, skills and keeping productivity high. IBM's tools, properly applied, can do that pretty well today. Most of the IBM education can't help an iSeries developer who's new to the web understand how to do that ... IBM is well aware that existing IBM education doesn't properly show iSeries developers how to get started with limited skills, be productive and deliver working web applications quickly. Expect to see significant changes coming next year in education for iSeries ... 6) ENVY. A hidden piece of VisualAge that most of IBM support knows little about ! Actually a very powerful, productive tool for managing code. There is no chance of code corruption with ENVY. With CVS in a good team environment that is well managed there is SOME chance of version control issues... 7) In the long run, the Eclipse platform is overall much better than the current basket of tools from IBM. It is easier to learn, adds new features, is industry standard and is extensible. The only negative are the "IBM decisions" on what gets left behind... Yes, we need a reliable, open source version control system so yes we can say goodbye to ENVY ( or make it open source ...). My other point on Eclipse is that beginners can't build client / server applications the first day period. You CAN do that with VisualAge now quite well. Given that you have to learn Java BEFORE you can create a client /server application with Eclipse, it's likely more developers will consider choosing Visual Basic. With VisualAge, client / server was incredibly productive and easy to learn compared to VB. It's almost as if IBM is saying now for client / server take a look at VB. I don't think Bill Gates needs any help in getting new developers... In the old VisualAge, it was very hard for anyone to seriously consider VB as a tool for iSeries client / server if your only skill set was RPG.... Again, I think you've made good choices strategically overall and are doing some nice things that hopefully other iSeries developers will pick up on as their skill sets grow... Jim Mason Message text written by INTERNET:java400-l@midrange.com > Jim, I used Eclipse a few months ago. It does have a debugger, but unless I missed it, you cannot change code as it executes. I did not care for the ENVY support because we use CVS, which is much better supported in Eclipse. They do need to work on the CVS and Ant support in Eclipse. Right now Eclipse is playing catch up, but with IBM's resources Eclipse has a lot of potential. This thread started with someone asking about deploying VAJ. VAJ has a learning curve that I would not climb at this point. I would get Eclipse, NetBeans, or something else. David Morris >>> JEMason@compuserve.com 12/17/01 07:40AM >>> Hi. Eclipse offers things vajava doesn't BUT it also misses much of what was good in vajava.... * no visual composition editor for automated generation of swing, awt interfaces * no ENVY version control for easier management of code than cvs Eclipse DOES have replacements for some things * new debug interface * bundled WebSphere Advanced Edition, Developer Edition for websphere testing The version I have does have some minor bugs but that will change rapidly... Jim Mason Message text written by INTERNET:java400-l@midrange.com > I have been using Eclipse for a few weeks and I think it is much better than VAJ. But for now it does not have WTE and EJB support. We may have to get WSAD for those. http://www.eclipse.org Bruce< <
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