RE: Lower End AS/400s

Jim,

I agree completely. With technology changing so fast
just about anything can become legacy overnite. Due
to platform limitations in the Win 3.1 and Win95 years
most of the fat client apps were pretty horrible or
half hearted attempts at migration.

It either takes a huge company or a one with a great
tech leader to walk between spending as little as
possible on re-engineering everything from the ground
up and make it work.

There is still tons of legacy RPG code around, most of
it pretty effective. And I would chose the proven
solution anytime if it met the overall needs.

Regards

Konrad

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Damato [mailto:jdamato@dollargeneral.com]
Sent: Monday, December 16, 2002 12:27 PM
To: 'midrange-l@midrange.com'
Subject: RE: Lower End AS/400s


> Konrad:
>
>Issue #2
>
>Cost of development -- the AS/400 was originally meant
>to be the "application system". Unfortunately many of
>the apps tended to be legacy ones written in horrible
>Synon or other patched together System 36 code. Since
>any RPG product by default is limited to the AS/400
>many companies looked at the risk reward and developed
>elsewhere.

Um, have you ever looked at applications written on other platforms?  I've
participated in the implementation of quite a few in the past few years and
I can tell you that things are bad all over.  I agree that the AS/400 lost
its edge in "application systems" due to unimpressive ports from S/36 and
S/38 and a lack of "openness" as folks developed client-server apps in the
90's.  Still, technology changed so quickly during that time that the
qualities (and quality) of an app can be distinguished by the year in which
it was developed.  Apps developed for Windows or Unix servers on open
relational databases became legacies overnight as architectures  changed
and/or improved.  Many application software vendors are desperately trying
to retire their original fat client efforts.  Some vendors have been barely
successful at an n-tier or web-deployed system, having mis-started a few
times often with customers debugging the failures.

I'll take a legacy RPG application over a software product that, under the
guise of an "upgrade", requires re-implementation on new technology every
two years.

-Jim
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