Re: The Perpetual Myth of iSeries Obsolescence

On 5/1/06, Jim Damato <jdamato@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Tom:
>...if you re-engineer the application
>to use modern UI principles, you will get
>a dramatic productivity improvement.

>...but the GUI has
>(in my view) more room for improvements.

I agree, however:

If you're not going to re-engineer the application to use modern UI
principles and you're not going to exploit the rich opportunities for
application improvements, you're just wasting time and effort.  You're
then binding your applications and businesses to complicated technology
and introducing considerable back-end costs and drag without good
reason.

I am not sure if I agree with this or not.  Clearly, re-engineering
applications solely to convert to GUI interfaces is a waste of time

improvements, it may be a good investment.  Also, I don't think that
there is a whole lot of additional cost for the vehicles for a modern
UI.  Now Websphere is expensive, but there are alternatives.  CGIDEV2
is free, the incremental cost of serving .NET is pretty small, and
Tomcat is free.

I personally don't believe that there is a majority of folks out there
developing to good, modern UI principles.  For every decent,
productivity-improving GUI app (in my opinion) there has got to be a
dozen or so mediocre collections of forms and programs developed by
"programmers" without much true application design education or
experience, and developed without the benefit of business analysis.

Agreed, but irrelevant.  First, remember that developers have to walk
before they can run.  Second, there are as many crappy green screen
apps as there are crappy GUI apps. Writing off GUI development because
many of the apps suck is muddied thinking.

Take care.

--
Tom Jedrzejewicz
tomjedrz@xxxxxxxxx