RE: Green screen - it's time is over -- MIDRANGE-L

Rob,

I didn't mean to imply there aren't strong cases for GUI apps.  Not at
all...

But I don't think a GUI and a mouse is necessary, or desirable, in a lot of
the apps where it's currently deployed.  But not saying there aren't A LOT
of good uses of GUI, either.

All things being the equal, I'd try character mode FIRST, and see if it
COULD work, before just assuming GUI is the only way to go.

jt


"Have a GREAT day...!  And a BETTER ONE TOMORROW~~~:-)" (sm)


> -----Original Message-----
> From: midrange-l-admin@midrange.com
> [mailto:midrange-l-admin@midrange.com]On Behalf Of rob@dekko.com
> Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2001 8:10 AM
> To: midrange-l@midrange.com
> Subject: RE: Green screen - it's time is over
> Importance: High
>
>
>
> I don't buy that argument about the green screen being so danged
> productive.  For example take a variable length field that can be larger
> than the screen size.  Sample use might be something that you used to
> execute EDTDOC for.  Notes on a particular matter or some such
> thing.  Now,
> let's put this in a window on the green screen and not use the
> full screen.
> In html this takes one line.  In green screen this takes many lines of DDS
> and RPG.
>
> Rob Berendt
>
> ==================
> "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
> safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
> Benjamin Franklin
>
>
>
>                     "jt" <jt@ee.net>
>                     Sent by:                  To:
> <midrange-l@midrange.com>
>                     midrange-l-admin@mi       cc:
>                     drange.com                Fax to:
>                                               Subject:     RE:
> Green screen - it's time is over
>
>                     11/13/2001 11:37 PM
>                     Please respond to
>                     midrange-l
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Al,
>
> You wrote "They don't care about sex appeal, all they care about
> is money."
> It seems to have gone out of fashion, but one never knows...
> Companies may
> go "back to the future" regarding profits, at some point in the near
> future...  Wish I was kidding.
>
> I think the thing that may turn it around is programmer
> productivity.  Sure
> green-screen performance is great.. but to me anyway, the key is how long
> does it take to put a screen together.  If your talking green-screen, your
> talking hours, instead of days, from start to finish.  Unless I'm sadly
> mis-reading the trends, programmer cost is in a perpetual incline, and
> hardware is the reverse.  At some point (by my reckoning 10 years ago)
> these
> lines crossed.
>
> Less PR costs isn't the only thing.  Less people also means less
> management
> overhead needed to keep things coordinated.
>
> Now some companies only know how to provide a career path through bringing
> personnel up through layers of management.   So they'll never achieve
> anything close to a "flat organization".  But many companies are not in
> that
> boat.
>
> JMHO
>
> jt
>
> "Have a GREAT day...!  And a BETTER ONE TOMORROW~~~:-)" (sm)
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: midrange-l-admin@midrange.com
> > [mailto:midrange-l-admin@midrange.com]On Behalf Of
> > barsa@barsaconsulting.com
> > Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2001 9:11 PM
> > To: midrange-l@midrange.com
> > Subject: RE: Green screen - it's time is over
> >
> >
> >
> > I don't think that green screen is really over.
> >
> > I have a client in the arbitrage business.  They had
> historically used an
> > application to generate printed reports on the "stuff" that they were
> > trading on an AS/400 620, with legacy applications written on COBOL.
> >
> > They decided that to get a faster turn around (i.e.: increase
> > profit), they
> > had to scrap the AS/400 application, and get a new application where the
> > data was presented interactively to the user, and the user made trades
> > interactively, with dramatically less turn around time.
> >
> > They decided to start with a clean slate and assume that the 400 was
> dead.
> > They looked all around the industry for the most programmer productive
> > platform for interactive custom programming and fast and easy of
> numerical
> > data entry.  What did they find?  The AS/400 green screen!!  Surprise,
> > surprise.
> >
> > They don't care about sex appeal, all they care about is money.
> > The 400 was
> > selected as the least expensive platform to do the new development (even
> > when you exclude the benefit of their existing expertise), the 400 green
> > screen was 7 to 10 times less expensive to develop for than any other
> > platform.  They further determined that 5250 architecture "dumb"
> > workstations were the fastest mode of data entry, and as speed/time is
> > money, that's what they picked.
> >
> > Cost to develop the new applications (pure program development):  $1M.
> > ROI                                           4 days.
> >
> > Yes, they had to upgrade the 620 CPW (110 approximately) to a 720 with
> 560
> > CPW interactive and 2000 CPW batch, but who the @#$% cares, when the ROI
> > was 4 days.  OK, add another $500K for new hardware, so the ROI is now
> out
> > to a ridiculous 6 days.
> >
> > Is the customer willing to be used as a reference account, no-way-Jose.
> > The 400 is a competitive advantage.
> >
> > The 400 lives, green screen lives, and profit is a good thing.
> >
> > BTW, I have two displays on my desk, a 3489 and a PC.  I literally never
> > use the PC for green screen data entry or SEU.  I've tried, but
> failed to
> > get into CODE/400, primarily because I cannot get over the apparent
> > productivity hump that PDM provides.
> >
> > Al - on the way back from Rochester
> >
> > Al Barsa, Jr.
> > Barsa Consulting Group, LLC
> >
> > 400>390
> >
> > 914-251-1234
> > 914-251-9406 fax
> >
> > http://www.barsaconsulting.com
> > http://www.taatool.com
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >                     "Walden H.
> >                     Leverich"                 To:
> > "'midrange-l@midrange.com'" <midrange-l@midrange.com>
> >                     <WaldenL@TechSoftIn       cc:
> >                     c.com>                    Subject:     RE:
> > Green screen - it's time is over
> >                     Sent by:
> >                     midrange-l-admin@mi
> >                     drange.com
> >
> >
> >                     11/13/01 10:36 AM
> >                     Please respond to
> >                     midrange-l
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Joe,
> >
> > With regard to your complaints against ODBC, can you be more specific?
> Are
> > you referring to client side code that actually updates the
> database (SQL
> > UPDATE, DELETE, INSERT) or would you include using ODBC to call stored
> > procedures on the AS/400?
> >
> > I'll agree that I don't want my client side code (be it JSP, ASP, VB,
> > Powerbuilder, Java, whatever) making direct updates into my
> > database, but I
> > don't see a problem using ODBC to call stored procedures. Use ODBC to
> call
> > stored procedures (especially through ADO) is relatively simple. Case in
> > point, I have an ASP-programmer in my office now calling stored
> procedures
> > on an AS/400. He wouldn't know an AS/400 if it fell on him. I say "call
> > this
> > sp" and he codes up the necessary ASP code. I could replace that AS/400
> > with
> > a SQL Server box and his code would never know the difference.
> >
> > -Walden
> >
> > PS. Actually, ODBC is dead. OLE/DB is the new replacement.
> However, I see
> > them used interchangeably.
> >
> > ------------
> > Walden H Leverich III
> > President
> > Tech Software
> > (516)627-3800 x11
> > WaldenL@TechSoftInc.com
> > http://www.TechSoftInc.com
> >
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Joe Pluta [mailto:joepluta@PlutaBrothers.com]
> > Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2001 12:41 AM
> > To: midrange-l@midrange.com
> > 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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