Re: Java on the AS/400

At 03:12 PM 5/28/98 -0400, Donna Zukowski wrote:
>I have been following this thread with interest.  I would like to keep
>my skills up to date (who wouldn't?) and was wondering what language
>would be best combined with my RPG and little bit of COBOL knowledge.  
>
>I admit my ignorance....is Java the same whether it is on a PC or on the
>AS/400?

Yes it is, as long as you stick to pure java, it is 100% platform independent. 
It will run on anything with a (J)ava (V)irtual (M)achine. The AS/400 toolbox 
however, contains code that is specific to the AS/400. It can be called from 
java, but is not, itself, pure java, consequently, code which uses it could not 
be ported to a DEC Alpha box without modification. IMHO, this is a nit. You  
know what platform your database is on. I hope java is successful in a big way. 
After you work with it a little, it's very powerful, supporting the object 
paradigm much more rationally than C++ <whoa, calm down>. There's a bit of a 
learning curve though, as you need to work with the standard classes in order 
to figure out what's there, and from an RPG coder's perspective, it's more 
difficult to get used to case sensitive names than you would expect, but still 
a lot of fun, and potentially very productive. IBM's Visual Age for Java is 
very slick, and a free introductory copy is included with V4!
R2 o
n a new box, as is a copy of JBuilder. There is a minimal version of VA/J 
available from IBM for a VERY reasonable price if you just want to play a 
little at home. Be aware though, the IDE needs at least a P133 with 24MB in 
order to run, and you won't like the performance on that class of PC.


Pete Hall
peteh@inwave.com 
http://www.inwave.com/~peteh/

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