RE: XML and AS/400 -- MIDRANGE-L

Jim,

Re J++ and after a week you having little success:

I am not surprised at this.  What the Trade rags forget when saying Java
will take over the world is that Java is object oriented.  And for a
procedural programmer such as an RPG person (Or Cobol, Fortran, etc), OO is
a huge paradigm shift.  It will take you more than a week to learn.  And
years to learn well.

Don't get me wrong, the pain of moving to OO is well worth it, just like the
pain of stop smoking is well worth it (or so I am told...I am going thru
this right now <g>).  But there is pain in doing it.

Bob

PS: I am not a Java advocate so much as an OO advocate...C++ is my poison of
choice

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-midrange-l@midrange.com [mailto:owner-midrange-l@midrange.com]On
Behalf Of Jim Langston
Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2000 6:29 PM
To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
Subject: Re: XML and AS/400

I tend to agree.  Soon after Java came out (maybe a year or two)
I was looking for compilers to buy.  I saw Delphi (Pascal) for $79,
VC++ for $190 or so, and J++ for $29.  I only had a little over a
hundred with me, so I bought the Delphi (which we at that point
used at work) and J++ 1.0, figuring $29 was enough to waste if it wasn't
any good.

I took both home and installed them, and was writing programs in
Delphi rather quickly (inside 1/2 an hour, as I already knew the language
and compiler).

Then I turned to J++ (Microsoft's first version of Java I believe) and
tried to work with it.  I had a real application I wanted to write, a family
tree program I could stick on my home page and let people "browse"
my family tree and add any entries they knew about (which I would
research and make sure they were correct before applying).  After a
week or so of trying to get the very first piece done, showing a picture
of a tree I had found, I gave up.  It would work in IE, but not in
Netscape.  And even in IE it didn't do it the way I wanted it to, even
though I was following the examples, and searching news groups, etc..

1.0 of just about anything is horrible, I understand.  But unless you
want to pay to be a beta tester (I usually beta test for free) stay away
from very new technology unless you have a very pressing reason to
use it immediately.  It will always take so much more resources to do
something in a "new" language than in a tried and true language,
just because it's been extensively debugged through use, for one
thing, and a lot of the tools have already been written.

In fact, I think I still have the Microsoft J++ 1.0 set at home.  What
to do with it?  Think it'll be a collectors item some day?  lol

Regards,

Jim Langston

"L. S. Russell" wrote:

> Nobody is saying ignore XML, just let it mature. Bandwagon jumpers
> should learn to use a little restraint.
> "Anybody who has every tried to implement EDI knows that the X12
> standard", he says with a chuckle "is anything but standard." And yet,
> thanks to all the bandwagon jumpers, and corporate profit centers we are
> forced to re-map ASN's for each and every freakin new customer.
> And so far XML is only slightly less disjointed a standard "again
> laughing".

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