Re: WDSC changing to RDi

Mike Cunningham wrote:

Joe, are you doing any presentations at COMMON next week? I have someone attending and already asked them to look at EGL while there so we know more about it and can make an informed decision. If you are I will be sure she attends one of your session.

I don't do COMMON. I will be doing a session at RSDC in June and several sessions at iSeries DevCon in October.

If hiding the complexity of java to business developers is EGLs role and it's tuned for iSeries deployment I may be willing to drop our java path and go to EGL with one nagging worry... will EGL end up like net.data... all the rage for a year or two and now it's hardly mentioned. Of course that's true of a lot of web development tools these days...

That's exactly what EGL's role is. It is the evolution of over 20 years of 4GL development, dating back to the CSP days. You can't predict anything, but you have to realize that unlike Net.data, which had only one audience, iSeries web developers, EGL is targeted at a much broader market. You can use EGL to write web applications, text-based appliacitons, batch applications, and you can run them on mainframes, midranges and even dsitributed environments with PC web appliances.

There's a much larger EGL community than there ever was for Net.data, I think.

p.s. but this makes me wonder even more. If EGL generates java and EGL is in RDi SOA then the pieces needed for java development must exist in RDi SOA for use by EGL. It would mean that the SOA client has been built to prevent access to something that is already there.

Your surmise is pretty keen, but IBM isn't hiding anything. Many of the pieces required for Java development will be there (heck pure Java development is in RDi, because you need it to write plug-ins!). Those things just won't be supported. As I understand it, if you go in and hand-code servlets and JSPs and the tool blows up on something, you won't be able to get support from IBM. But don't quote me on that; IBM is still trying to figure out whether the System i needs a full J2EE toolset. It's not like our community has been beating down the doors of Java development <grin>.

Joe