Re: EJB versus RPG/COBOL

[Evan Harris <spanner@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Dieter

this is not a forum I usually speak in :) but I was motivated to respond to 
your comment regarding "thousands of subfile programs doing all the same 
stuff".

I my view the subfile capability provided by the AS/400 could more fairly 
be compared to a VB data grid or a higher level tool than a straight 
language issue. There are thousands of subfile applications because there 
are thousands of different business.

The real insight into what OS/400 buys you, and by extension in this 
discussion what RPG buys you, is that those thousands of subfile programs 
didn't also need to have all the supporting logic surrounding paging, item 
positioning, item selection etc etc built in each of the applications, it 
was provided by the OS.

There would be a ton of additional logic required to code this level of 
presentation in any other language without the use of the components that 
you claim provide Java's advantage so your comparison is somewhat unfair, 
IMHO. :)

Regards
Evan Harris


> One of the points for writing java applications is the existence of quite a
> lot of opensource components making it easy and eficcient to write business
> applications in java. If I have a look to rpg applications, the wheel is
> reinvented over and over, thousends of subfile programms doing all the same
> stuff. In a well designed Java app, you have STRUTS for example, and some
> JSPs doing all this, you have a persistence layer done by OJB for instance,
> with or without Entity Beans.