RE: Web apps on the AS/400 -- MIDRANGE-L

> Programming business green screen apps doesn't mean you did CGI programming.  
>Write some RPG CGI apps, let folks critique your code (as I do on the JAva 
>list), then I'll accept your opinion of it.  That's not too much to ask. 
--------
This is a very interesting statement.  You seem to think that CGI programming 
is some different, higher order of programming than other RPG programming.  
That those of us who have coded in RPG for a couple of decades aren't qualified 
to have an opinion on this "new" technology of CGI-RPG.  I'd like to review 
that.

Standard green screen application: initialize, read data, write to a screen 
preformatted via DDS.  Wait.  Read input from screen.  Process that input, 
updating the database as necessary.  Repeat.

CGI application: Call APIs to recover my state.  Call APIs reading input from 
browser.  Process that input, updating the database as necessary.  Read data, 
formatting an HTML panel for the user.  Output the HTML using some APIs.

Let's see here.  The "process that input, updating the database as necessary" 
part is pretty much the same for CGI as for traditional programs.  Business 
logic is business logic, although you have some additional complexity to handle 
stateless transactions, such as cookies.  But other than that, it's pretty much 
read database, do calcs, write database.  No magical skills required that me 
and the other RPG dinosaurs don't have.  And the "recover my state" business?  
RPG II programmers were doing that in the 70's - it's called NEP-MRT processing 
on a System/3.

No, the bulk of the difference is in the I/O portion.  And what's different?  
Well, in CGI you have to format your entire data stream, appending HTML tags in 
the appropriate places.  So the bulk of the difference between traditional 
programming and RPG-CGI is the formatting of the output stream and the use of 
APIs to communicate with the UI.  To me, that means that the primary difference 
between traditional RPG and CGI-RPG centers around using RPG for things it's 
not particularly good at: string formatting and stream I/O.  Now, I admit you 
are probably much better at writing stream I/O in RPG than I am, Brad.  And I 
can guarantee this, you'll likely REMAIN better at it, because to me it makes 
no sense to me to use the language that way.

And I have plenty of experience doing CGI programming using servlets.  There is 
absolutely zero conceptual difference between CGI programming in RPG and CGI 
programming in servlets, except perhaps that servlets are better at preserving 
state than RPG-CGI.  That's why the JavaServer Page API was invented: the folks 
who were using CGI realized there needed to be a better way.

I won't write CGI-RPG, Brad.  It's a strategically unsound architecture, in my 
opinion, and I choose not to pursue it.  There's nothing CGI-RPG can provide 
that I can't get through servlets or JavaServer Pages.

My opinion stands.
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