Re: webfacing and competing products

["Buck" <buck.calabro@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My opinion on this thread.

There is a single, simple concept that just doesn't get much airtime in this
debate: French is not English spoken with a funny accent.  That is to say,
you can't translate English into French word by word and have it look like
the French written by a Frenchman.  I don't know of a GUI that isn't
character mode as opposed to 5250 block mode.  5250 automatically translated
to some GUI panel by panel doesn't look like GUI written by a GUI guy.  More
critically, the translated application will not behave like a GUI
application written by a GUI guy, because the GUI panels are still calling
the back end RPG.

This is important to bear in mind because if the automated tool creates
Really Hideous GUI panels by default, you will be spending time 'cleaning'
them up, adjusting the rules or even changing the DDS to conform better to
the tool.  This bears directly on the time to market, which is probably the
main reason for using an automated conversion in the first place (as opposed
to writing a native GUI solution from scratch.)

You should insist on a trial run to see how the default panels turn out.  I
have seen conversions from 5 vendors and I would say that not a single one
was good enough out of the box to put in front of customers.  Some tools
don't even generate a default set of panels; leaving that up to you.  Once
you've decided that tweaking is necessary, have a beginner (not the vendor's
expert) change the translated panels.  Let's face it - you're in this for
speed, and when you get rolling, you'll probably have several beginners
grinding at the panels, not the vendor expert.

It's crucial that the trial works with YOUR code and YOUR panels, not
someone else's.  What goes on in your DDS is not likely to be the same as
what went on anywhere else.  Different tools work better with different DDS
sets.  Just because one tool did a poor conversion doesn't mean that all
tools will.  Try them all.

1) No conversion is ever going to look like native GUI
2) No conversion is ever going to work like native GUI
3) You WILL be cleaning up the converted panels
4) The learning curve for cleaning them up depends on
  a) the underlying technology
  b) the degree of cleaning up you want to perform

  --buck