Re: Green screen - it's time is over

Who says the green screen is history?
Just how much of todays business do you think gets down outside of a green 
screen
and batch?  <grin>

Okay, some of the screens are windows applications now, but they are still 
pretty much
just green screens - with only limited intelligence in them. (After all, they 
are Windows! :)

But a little more seriously, the green screen and batch world are far from dead.
The are, in fact, still the most used application platform on the planet, if 
you count
in the UNIX applications and the OS/390 applications.

Green screens, even on the iSeries machines, are not going to go away for a 
long, LONG
time.

-Paul


----- Original Message -----
From: "Joe Pluta" <joepluta@PlutaBrothers.com>
To: <midrange-l@midrange.com>
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2001 11:41 PM
Subject: Green screen - it's time is over


> Man, I thought I was long winded.  The same arguments have been being
> repeated over and over here, to what avail I'm not sure.  But I thought I'd
> try to recap a couple of the salient points, and then try to make something
> constructive.
>
> 1. IBM did not one day say, "Let's charge extra for interactive!"  The price
> per CPW has been dropping for both interactive and batch machines.  It's
> just that the batch machines are dropping much, much faster.  I don't know
> IBM's philosophy, nor does anyone on this list, but I have a feeling it has
> something to do with trying to get as much revenue as possible from the
> green screen while at the same time moving away from it.  Which brings me
> to...
>
> 2. Green screen is going away.  The old 5250 interactive feature, which made
> the AS/400 pretty much unique among the midrange world, is gone.  Dead.
> Kaput.  You can still try to hang on to the old architecture, but it will
> cost you.  That's the reality, no matter how much wailing and gnashing of
> teeth happens here.  If you think you can change it, I suggest you get
> together a coalition of people and talk to IBM.  Constantly rehashing the
> argument here isn't going to do anything to change the reality of the
> current situation.
>
> And that's what I want to focus on for a moment.
>
> The truth is that the AS/400, now spelled iSeries, is still the best
> business platform available.  But its uniqueness no longer resides in that
> wonderful integrated 24x80 window that we grew up with.  Instead, it lies in
> the ability to write powerful applications in languages with tight
> integration to its incredible database.  Personally, I think IBM's direction
> of pushing everything to SQL is ludicrous, but it is silly for me to whine
> about SQL.  Instead, I need to embrace it as best I can and work it into a
> realistic development environment.
>
> What I can do is to try to stop the proliferation of a couple of bad
> elements:
>
> ODBC.  Plain and simple, ODBC is a horrid idea for anything but the
> occasional data mining application.  If you need to update data, do it
> through servers.  In fact, learn to love the concept of tiered designs, and
> build your applications accordingly.  It won't cost you a lot, and once you
> have, it will be wonderful.  It sure beats SQL, which I have shown
> repeatedly to be far inferior in performance to record-level access for any
> transaction-based updates.
>
> J2EE.  Enterprise Java Beans simply have little place in most applications.
> The overhead is excessive, and a standard way of defining business objects
> and the methods that update them simply hasn't been developed yet.  Until
> that time, EJB is simply extra overhead.
>
> If we avoid these two things, the iSeries, especially in its server
> incarnation, beats any other machine out there hands down in total cost of
> ownership, and in reliability and scalability.  If we join together to
> develop some standard interfaces that allow data and programs on the iSeries
> to be incorporated into general n-tier distributed applications, then the
> iSeries will easily take on all comers.
>
> Or, we can continue to bemoan the loss of our beloved green screen.  We can
> reminisce wistfully about nickel soda pops and drive-in theaters, while the
> world zips on by with Internet enabled applications running on Microsoft IIS
> talking to whatever database server currently isn't crashing or locking up.
> We can get used to unreliable systems and long delays while "indexes are
> rebuilt" or "servers are synchronized".  We can twiddle our thumbs and
> remember the good old days as yet another mission critical system succumbs
> to some hacker's latest love child.
>
> It's up to us.  The future is here, and in the future I see, the iSeries has
> a huge part.  But it's not going to be as just another ODBC server - it's
> going to be as the central business logic processor of my networked
> applications.  I may have Microsoft, I may have Linux - in fact I may have
> many of those boxes, since I'll need failover for the toy operating systems
> that run the Flash presentations that smooth-talking dot-com consultants
> sell to management.  But when push comes to shove, my mission critical
> systems are going to be written in RPG, run on DB2, and talk to the world
> through secure messaging.
>
> You with me?  If so, quit worrying about the demise of the green screen.
> It's already happened, but we just haven't admitted it yet.  Right or wrong,
> the brave new world is upon us, and it's up to us to bring our platform into
> it.  And if we do... if we do, we'll have not only the best damned server on
> the market, but a whole new architecture that may just roll back some of the
> tide of bloatware that has tainted our industry and our profession ever
> since the first release of Windows.
>
> No, I may never write an entire operating system in 32KB again, but I can
> fight to make sure that business rules aren't written in SQL and databases
> aren't updated by Java Beans.  At least for a little while.  And that isn't
> just tilting at windmills, I don't think.
>
> Joe Pluta
> www.plutabrothers.com
>
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