RE: TRYING undestanding new AS Iserv -- MIDRANGE-L

Do you mind to share some more details about this approach?

TIA Marco

P.S. Any problem with spaghetti?
--- "Pantzopoulos, Mike" <mikepantzopoulos@mynd.com> wrote:
> We have just done this to our General Insurance package.
> We have layered
> both the display and data base functions by replacing the
> device dependant
> verbs (EXFMT,READ, CHAIN etc.) with functions which
> perform the requested
> operation and return buffers, or accept buffers. In fact
> the request code to
> the DB interface is the RPG verb! The beauty of this
> approach is that it
> doesn't matter where the data comes from, it will be
> processed by a single
> set of business rules.
> (I recently heard a story of one of our customers who
> hired the Gen-X
> websters to build a web quotation. They did it. The web
> quote was $129.88.
> When the client accepted the quote, the back-end AS400
> invoiced the client
> for $143!  The AS400 was the correct price (of
> course!).Layering enables our
> debugged code of 15 years to not be re-written. For the
> display function we
> actually invoke an RPG program either on the same AS400
> or another AS400 by
> using MQ Series to manage the transportation. We can also
> use MQ Series to
> transport the same buffers to an NT and we currently are
> at the prototype
> stage with a Visual Studio solution for the presentation
> layer to a Browser.
> We have also recently developed a way of creating XML
> structures to form
> the screen buffers. It's quite neat and the XML
> syntax/structure can be used
> by both the browser and the 5250 display program.
> 
> I am now writing a tool to automatically layer our
> software based on rules
> established with prototypes. 
> 
> We have the benefit of having written our system
> according to strict
> programming standards. I would hate to try to do this
> sort of work on some
> of the spaghetti I've seen in the RPG world. Having
> strict programming
> standards allows us to write a tool to convert the
> programs. Otherwise one
> is faced with the need to go into hand-to-hand combat.
> 
> The beauty of the layering is that the calling program
> doesn't care where
> the buffer comes from, be it EDI, on-line, browser
> interface, card input(!).
> By the same token, it doesn't care where the data record
> comes from. It
> could be the DB on the same AS400, a DB2 db on another
> AS400, or on an
> Oracle db on some other box. It's the ultimate in plug
> and play. This is the
> only way to keep up with the rapid development of PC
> tools. Although I must
> say Interpretive Basic has come a long way in the past 20
> years going by how
> some of the scripting processing works in the web world.
> We used MQ because
> its supported on about 35 different platforms and it
> works a treat. The Red
> book was all I needed to get the thing going. 
> The only way to keep up is to be flexible. The only way
> to be flexible is to
> hide the specifics in APIs. Yeah sure there's a bit more
> overhead, but cpu
> cycles are cheaper than human cycles.
>     
> 


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