RE: IBM's VARPG - What can it and cant it do.

Booth,

>What it does do is allow an RPG programmer to write true client/server
>applications including subfiles with scroll bars, update panels for files,
>pushbuttons instead of Function keys, notebooks with various data gathered
>in a orderly fashion, graphs, bar charts, colors, point and click
>navigation, and windows sized to your choices instead of 80 or 132
>columns. Appearance is far superior to green screen and users generally
>prefer the VARPG applications better.

With the greatest respect, a graphical "look and feel" are not the same as
true client/server.  I write client/server apps in plain RPG on the AS400
(no PC) where many interactive jobs communicate via data queue to a single
batch server job.  Marketing folks might have us believe that client/server
means PC/server, but that isn't the case.

Why bring that up?  Marketing's main reason to sell VaRPG: the claim of
being able to "preserve your investment in RPG programmers."  If your RPG
programmers write S/36 style code on the AS400, they will surely do the same
thing on the PC.  Having already seen the results of THAT, I can tell you
emphatically that the main lesson that needs to be learnt is that Windows
programming is the hard part - NOT the RPG/Visual Basic/Delphi part.  If
your brain is in 5250 block mode, you simply don't think about things like
tab order, accelerator keys, resizing the window for different display
resolutions and so on.  You need to become familiar with the Windows
standards and use them.

Can VaRPG programmers write Windows standard code?  Absolutely!  The caution
is that they won't do it from the get-go: they'll need training, and a good
checklist to make sure they conform to standards.

Notice that this whole topic of "information presentation" makes no
reference to "n-tier" client/server at all.  THAT's a whole other ball of
wax; another sticking point when we talk about "preserving" legacy RPG
programmers skills in the new multi-platform environment.  

If I had to pick the main advantage of VaRPG, I'd say it's that the
programmer does not have to be concerned with the minutiae of memory
management.  That's the ticklish part about most of the PC languages.  It
can also use RPG-traditional I/O to the AS400.  The downside is that it has
trouble dealing with common Windows standards: Win32 API, DLL's, OCX's and
ActiveX.  Of course, it's getting better at these with every release.

Buck Calabro
Billing Concepts Albany, NY
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