RE: framework question -- JAVA400-L

> From: Marc Logemann
> 
> If you have an Article which knows how to calculate itself generally,
> you can create a child of
> Article, for instance Batharticle, you can easily override the
> calculation for that, reuse the
> one the Article has or even mix both caculations.

This will never work in the real world where you have hundreds,
thousands or even millions of individual items.  Are you going to create
a separate class for each one?  Or are you going to somehow specify in
the item master file which class the item belongs to?  It's clear to me
you've never really done this, except as a thought exercise.


> All this in a defined
> namespace resulting readable
> code.

Namespaces can be done in procedural code just as easily.  IBM allows
long, mixed-case names for procedures, so it's quite easy to do your own
namespace.  I don't look to the language to enforce my naming
conventions.


> In procedural languages, you mostly have function-collections with
> name clashes which call
> each other quite wildly. To me, working with Inheritance or OO in
> general makes reading code much
> easier, its more expressive.

See?  You've already started using soft words like "expressive".
Experssive is in the eye of the beholder.  If you have lots od name
clashes, that simply means you're careless in your naming.


> If business programming can be achieved with Java? Look at all those
big
> projects going on, most
> banking applications are converted to java,

Such as?


> ebay is on the way to be
> converted from procedural
> stuff  to java.

We'll see how that goes, but if Java were so great, there would be a lot
more success stories in the six or seven years it's been around.
Instead, there has been pretty much nothing but spectacular failures
such as the San Francisco project.


> IBM is trying to move all its customers to java, so i
> think, business programming is not so cumbersome at all.

IBM wants you to move to Java so it can sell you more hardware, pure and
simple.


> If you speak of quick hacking, OO is not
> the perfect choice, then
> you are better of  with also not using ILE. Then RPG/400 is the way to
> go ;-) Or use one of these
> sillly iSeries 4GL RAD Tools like Magic or the other one whose name i
> forgot.

Marc, I get the idea you've never actually coded in a production
environment.  What you call "quick hacking" I call responding to
external business decisions.  Such as "Today customer XYZ gets a 10%
discount on the anything he's never bought before."  I can code that in
a few lines of RPG and insert it into the appropriate place in the job
stream.  With OO, I have to first figure out which class calculating the
price, then be sure it has access to the history information.  If not, I
probably have to change the method to make that information available.
That probably involves adding a new method procedure.  Then I probably
have to JAR up the new class and insert it into the web server, which
usually involves bringing the application down and restarting it.

Sorry, Marc, but the real world doesn't have the time for OO.

Joe