If you want to sell something, you'll have to talk about all the things
that are good and new on the System i5. It's best to ignore legacy
technologies like 5250 or RPG in such discussions, and talk about them like
the died a long time ago.
So eventually, with all the nice features of LPARS, Disk Management, HMC,
etc, you will need to have applications run on the i5, because without apps
it's just an expensive DB server. The reason for the previous sentence is
for myself to learn what others are doing with great success to give their
i5 apps the look and feel that this generation of users demands.
This past week Shane from this list offered up a case study (soon to be
posted on imho.midrange.com) from his company that tried to use IBM's
recommended direction of Webfacing and it failed to meet expectations on a
variety of fronts. They then went with RPG CGI and the users/managers loved
it. When asked what technology was "making it happen", RPG was proudly
proclaimed and the manager didn't even believe Shane. The fact of the
matter is, there is very little you CAN'T do with RPG. The obvious problem
is we don't have all of the nice frameworks that all the other languages
have. One of the first could be said to be CGIDEV2 and then the Renaissance
framework second, but those came after web had been around a number of
years. How long with RPG lag behind on other UI fronts?
More just rambling than anything. I guess I am seeing the reasoning of some
that say "sure, you have the best box out there, but you don't have pretty
applications that tickle me when I look at them". Maybe it is time we took
matters into our own hands.
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
midrange.com
