RE: Thoughts on Enterprise Rent-a-car

Nina,

It's not uncommon for an client GUI app to have a much slower startup than
what you're accustomed to with an 5250 program. There are several factors
that contribute to this, but I've found that the worst culprit usually tends
to be the database. It's common practice to perform the database connection
during application startup, and some DB's are pretty slow to respond. DB/400
is (in my experience) one of the slowest. Of course, that may have a lot to
do with the size of machine that I'm accessing - 170-2160 w/256MB.

Most users don't complain about the initialization time though. They
normally add an application to the Startup group and leave it active for the
entire day. What matters to them is what functionality the application
provides, and how responsive it is while they are interacting with it.

There is just so much more that you can provide to a user with a GUI than
you can with the 5250 data stream, that I've never worried about being
tarred and feathered for the intialization time. I'm of the opinion that
5250 has it's place, as does GUI. However I've yet to hear a single user ask
me to convert one of our new GUI interfaces to a 5250 screen that they can
access from a terminal emulator. On the other hand, the list of RPG
applications that they would like converted to GUI grows weekly. That's just
my personal experience - YMMV.

Having said all that, I must admit that the 5 minute startup you mentioned
sounds like something is terribly wrong in that application. What I consider
a long initialization time is 15 to 45 seconds. Anything beyond that leads
me to believe that there is a problem somewhere, or that the developer is
inexperienced.


Regards,

John Taylor
Canada


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-midrange-l@midrange.com
> [mailto:owner-midrange-l@midrange.com]On Behalf Of nina jones
> Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2000 8:04 PM
> To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
> Subject: Re: Thoughts on Enterprise Rent-a-car
>
> even if the response time is 3 minutes, hey, it's gui, right!
>
> we have a client that had an in house programmer write an interface for
> our maintenance, and a p/c application in access.  i'd heard how
> wonderful it was, etc.  well when i saw it for real, it took 5 minutes
> to call the thing up.  i was shocked, i'd have been tarred and
> feathered.
>

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