Re: Legacy code. -- MIDRANGE-L




>Perhaps I need to look very closely at ILE again.  Last time I looked, it
>didn't
>co-exist too well with OPM: the interaction between named activation
groups
>and the default activation group left something to be desired.  Also,
lack of
>MAKE and documentation tools.  

I think it is a good idea to look at and consider ILE very closely. It
offers some very important features to AS/400 development and is really
the current leading edge for 400 development. 

I did not mean to state that it should be used with OPM. What I meant
about VA RPG is that I feel that RPG shops would be well served to develop
graphic clients and that VA RPG is a good tool for that. 

I haven't used CODE/400 in an ILE environment, so I have posted this to
both the midrange and the Code 400 lists. I would like to know if the
build utilities used with Workframe can be used for ILE development as
well. If so, using Code/400 would give you a graphic client and allow easy
ILE development with all the advantages of a PC based development
environment. I have written thousands of lines of code using the Workframe
environ. I prefer it to Watcom, but I don't know how well it compares to
others. I found it excellant myself.

>There was the sense here that ILE was too little, too late (but that
doesn't 
>mean much).  The biggest hurdle here was teaching OO design
>methodology to people who've never heard of it.  "Too much learning
>curve" was what I kept hearing...  Is that just a rumour?

The learning curve for OO _is_ severe. That is why ILE is a good idea. It
is not really OO. Now, the ability to bind by reference and to declare
private and public (exported or not exported) variables and functions
(methods) is a step towards OO programming. However, there are key
features to OO programming that are missing from this environment. Rather
than get into that, I just want to point out that this (ILE) is a great
step in a right direction.

The modular approach is a big timesaver. One that most shops would
practice anyway if the overhead from CALL/PARM wasn't so high. ILE
overcomes the performance problem and give options for modularity. Service
programs allow you to create as close to an "object" as you can get right
now and allow you to seperate the development of underlying routines from
the development of the high level application. 

OO thinking is a big change from procedural. That's why so much C++ code
is crap. What you need to do is not just learn to get what you want done
within the limits of the language/environment, but also to utilize the
features. I think that ILE is a good step, a median step for AS/400 shops
with RPG programmers who cannot make the leap to OO.

>Buck Calabro




Chris Rehm
Mr.AS400@ibm.net
You have to ask yourself, "How often can I afford to be unexpectedly out of 
business?" 
Get an AS/400.
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