Re: Thoughts on Enterprise Rent-a-car

[nina jones <ddi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 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.

actually, it was all done on a p/c, db/400 wasn't used here at all. 
there was a program written to later write the maintenance changes to
the as/400.
 
> 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.

but they were complaining!  i just never got wind of it until i went
there and saw it up close and personal.  my point was sometimes you
don't hear all the story, just the spin!
 
> 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.

i don't disagree with that (users wanting gui), but the way it was done,
it might have well been green screen!  i think she used that project to
cut her teeth in programming, and it wasn't very well done.  the users
were just going into the as/400 green screen to make changes, and then
the company couldn't understand how the databases were getting out of
allignment.

then the lady that wrote these programs quit and took a real programming
job after she got a bit of experience under her belt..

nj
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