Re: Call Java program from RPGLE

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 12:54 PM, Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
<thunderaxiom@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

David Gibbs skrev den 06-03-2008 19:35:

This PDF is a good reference:

> http://publibfp.boulder.ibm.com/pubs/html/as400/v5r1/ic2929/books/c0925073.pdf
>
> Just search for the term java.
>
As a curious byseer, is there any who have worked with this who can say
how well it works in terms of speed, maintainability (how fragile is
this?) and general usefulness?

Always willing to learn something new :)

I'm a big fan of calling Java from RPG, and use it regularly with
great success... both in batch and interactive jobs.

Some areas where I'm using it in production include sending formatted
email reports, service and customer notifications via email (using
javamail and the apache velocity template engine). I also use it in
mid level networking code as I find dealing with sockets in java to be
much, much simpler than any c or RPG code I've come across.

It's nice to be able to take advantage of many of Java's strong points
from within RPG (such as XML parsing/building (JDOM), string handling
and manipulation, regular expressions... I could go on...). I also
find that prototyping on java standard library objects allows me to
essentially extend the RPG language to fit my needs; no associative
arrays in RPG, no problem, just prototype and instantiate a new Java
collections object like a HashMap, viola! Simple custom class wrappers
can be used to translate '400 data types to the java equivalents.

One more point worth noting is that using java objects allows you to
add some level of object oriented structure/support to your RPG code,
which worked nicely for me in many situations.

Cheers,
Carl.