Re: Who's using ILE RPG IV and Activation Groups

>Steven Easton
>seaston@ionet.net<

<SNIP>

> Triggers are just as complicated.  Both functions are powerful, but not easy
to use.  
>I think IBM should work harder at making thing easy to use.  Activation groups
do not meet my
>expectations.  Thankfully, I have the option not to use them.

Steve,  I agree with alot of what your saying,   R/I  for example is NOT
something that you just 
"throw over your systems" one day because you think it's a neat idea.
Triggers however,  I think
are as about as simple of an implementation as you can get. - "If this file
changes,  This program 
gets called"   the rules and reg.'s that go with that (no CLRPFM, CRTDUPOBJ
things,  etc)  are
just part of whats common sense and needed.

Two examples,  1.  I wrote for a client a data mirroring system that mirrors 6
AS/400's in a true 24/7
mode ( with recovery, and the ability to switch from their machine to run on the
host and back) 
using triggers and APPC.  I found triggers simple to use and powerful

2.  We have a large 3 party manufacturing package,  and we needed to tie their
product master
to our aux. product master( with company specific fields).   We didn't want to
get into the multitude
of their 10,000 statement programs and change them  to make this happen.  We
just put a 
trigger on their product master (doing some checking, like seeing if it was an
interactive job,
looking at the program stack and see what application program was calling the
trigger,etc.)
and then put up OUR add/Change aux product master maintenance program screen.

The end user just saw Our program come up right after the 3party program's
screens.
very nice.   Triggers made that possible simply.

>>I suspect ILE was ment to lure software vendors from other platforms to the
AS400. <<

Late binding programs (True dynamic call)  was touted for years as a very big
plus of the SYS/38
and AS/400 by people at seminars ( J. Sears included).    

BUT  dynamic calls for OO type programs or "C" programs where you're calling
thousands of times
per invocation KILLED the machine.    Don't you remember the bad press that the
AS/400 got
when C first was implemented?   "C is supposed to run at the machine level REAL
fast but the 
performance on the AS/400 is terrible,   I guess the AS/400 isn't a very good
machine"

ILE was put there so that we could have true Link/Edited, sorry   I mean  Bound
calls
 (where did link/edit  come from?)  So that MAJOR software developers could port

their existing apps (can you say unix) over to  the AS/400 (oh, so THATs how
they got 
SAP3 to run on the AS/400)

Activiation groups and more importantly how the error handling has changed with
named 
activations  is alittle more tricky.    You'd better know real well how errors,
*PSSR,  etc. are
handled with named activiations or you will have  " a learning experience"   
Read  Russ popeil's book or attend one of his sessions at COMMON for some good
back
ground on that subject.  

BUT activation groups allow us to do some Great things with PAG resources and
are very 
well worth boning up on to take advantange of them

John P. Carr 
EdgeTech

P. S.  I also remember/worked on  DE-RPG and WSU

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* This is the Midrange System Mailing List!  To submit a new message,   *
* send your mail to "MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com".  To unsubscribe from     *
* this list send email to MAJORDOMO@midrange.com and specify            *
* 'unsubscribe MIDRANGE-L' in the body of your message.  Questions      *
* should be directed to the list owner / operator: david@midrange.com   *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *