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

The only area I disagree with is the part about dealing with Wn32, etc. 
To me that is an upside.  <vbg> One can have good gui design without
ActiveX and Win APIs.  

The other area I would comment on is the 5250 block mentality problem.  I
believe that may be real but not serious.  Many of the samples show
salient points and other windows applications show ideas and methods.  A
good programmer will shift his thinking quickly and resoundingly. 
Incident-based programming is a breath of fresh air.



In <85B4A4E126D7D21180950090274EA1560B7D26@commsoft3.commsoft.net>, on
06/02/99 
   at 09:47 AM, Buck Calabro <mcalabro@commsoft.net> said:

>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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Booth Martin
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