I don't think I would be so annoyed at the $4,000 cost per seat if IBM had not told us all just two years ago, via their Developers Roadmap, we should all be headed in the java development direction/web GUI direction and here is a tool (WDSC) to help you get there and because we bundled all of our iSeries development tools into one product you get WDSC added to that bundle for no additional upfront cost, just keep paying maintenance. And you should also start using WDSC for ALL development as we are going to do away with SEU/SDA someday. And the roadmap showed us all that WDSC would take you up to just before you need to bring J2EE into the picture. We are not doing J2EE development and I do not see us going there. Now two years later they pull WDSC as a product and give us 2 years (2010) to get rid of it. Since SEU/SDA is not being worked on any more I wonder where my support money for that product is going, here I thought it was going into WDSC but I guess I was wrong. If RAD has a bunch more features than WDSC I wouldn't mind paying some trade-in/upgrade cost but nowhere near $4,000+ per developer. I know we did our first java web app using the free Sun developer tool and deployed it under Tomcat, maybe we will go back to that or the MyEclipse toolset you referenced or look at JBoss for development and as an application server. I think I remember someone said that had that running on i5OS.
-----Original Message-----
From: java400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:java400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Joe Pluta
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2008 3:11 PM
To: Java Programming on and around the iSeries / AS400
Subject: Re: WDSC changing to RDi
Mike Cunningham wrote:
I just got another update on the switch from the 2 flavors of WDSC to the three flavors of RDi for iSeries developers. It looks like anyone using the "free" version of WDSC and currently doing Java development for deployment to the "free" WAS on iSeries is going to have to fork over $4,000+ to IBM to continue to develop Java applications for the web. RDi base version does only RPG/COBOL/SDA/SEU green-screen development and RDi SOA does RDi plus EGL but to get to the java toolset you have to get RAD. There is no planned upgrade path from WDSC to RAD, you can only buy a new license. That is how I interpret what I heard at a webinar yesterday. Can anyone confirm this for me?
A lot of the confusion has to do with terminology. There is a
difference, for example, between "Java development" and "J2EE
development". J2EE includes things like web design and testing which
are not included in RDi. They were part of WDSC, no more. That is the
real upshot of the whole WDSC thing.
If you were using WDSC for web application development (like I was),
then you basically got a great IDE free for a couple of years, primarily
because they didn't have a good way of separating out the System i
specific bits from the rest of the RAD components. They have managed to
do that now, and we're seeing the result: separate pricing for
individual components.
If you want to continue doing J2EE development, you have several
options. The $4000 a seat for RAD is the initial price, and then you
pay maintenance (which I believe may be $800 a year, but don't quote
me). The comparable price for, say, Red Hat Developer license is a flat
$3500 a year. You can get JBoss Developer Studio for $100, but that's
with no support. You can also get MyEclipse for $30 a year, $60 if you
want a debugger and a GUI designer, or the WebSphere development version
for $150 a year.
There has been talk about RDi-RAD. Whether that is going to be a
separate offering or simply a co-installation of RDi and RAD, and what
it will cost System i developers remains to be seen.
So the short answer is that if you want to use IBM tools, your only
option right now is RAD at $4000 a seat, or switch to MyEclipse.
Whatever the cost, I don't think System i developers should be paying
the full $4000 a seat for RAD, but I don't have control over anything
(ask my wife). Tell your rep and make them explain why you should spend
the extra money for RAD. But then again, somebody explain to me why the
Red Hat Developer's license is $3500 a year...
Joe
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