Re: 5733QU2 - No Developer Discount

Bummer.

I am going to echo several of the sentiments here and say that this further constrains us "green screen" folks from moving into the web world. I don't mind being charged for something but it seems like the latest moves by IBM just make things more expensive and difficult, which is curious if the goal is to motivate developers to move to the web. Query/400 is nearly ubiquitous in the System i world and even back in the day it wasn't an expensive item, relative to other tools. And, it didn't take a "designer" tool and a "runtime" tool to get the job done. Why is it that when it comes to tools, web tools, IBM is just now delivering what is needed. Even then it is at an expense or is packaged in such a way that it is out of reach of developers and then costly to deploy to customers. I would understand it if this was 1997 and we had to pay dearly to play in an emerging "web world". But this is the 21st century and IBM should be providing all of these tools in a "base" system. An "off the rack" model. Instead, web development tools are treated like some kind of extra add on that only the "esoteric" developer would be interested in (and would pay a premium for at that). Sigh....

I'll see if I can give it this a try at a customer's site. My hand-me-down 270 isn't on SWMA so I can't order it (I was hoping to get it through SAC). I might be able to get it for my developer leased 520 (I'll have to check).

Meanwhile, I am pretty comfortable with Jasper Reports (Java) and perhaps I can write some RPG wrappers that could run the Jasper Reports objects. The iReport designer makes building the report easy and they look slick. I'll just need to make sure that the report object is in the classpath and build a wrapper to run it. The report would have to be saved to the IFS and then retrieved from there but that might just work.

Another project on the list...

Pete

Vernon Hamberg wrote:

Pete

I looked at SAC today - as far as I can see, this product is not there for download - there is an old one from 2003 or 2004 that has nothing to do with this, except the name, AFAIK.

Saw Tom McKinley give a presentation on it at RPG & DB2 Summit - it looks very impressive, may have some of the same issues that Crystal does (possibility of poorly formed generic SQL), but they might be working on it. It's based on a product from another company - not IBM. Extra bits come from them. You can get add-ins - forgot the name they use (handlers?) - for other RDBMS - even can do federated queries - JOINs between disparate databases - but I bet that involves the SPDMNY command.

Vern

At 07:12 PM 10/5/2007, you wrote:

Couldn't you do an evaluation on the 270 (if that was all you were
interested in)?

Bummer that it is so pricey. You'd be better off to buy into the
Software Access Catalog program for $795.00 You get access to whole kit
and kaboodle of IBM Software (for evaluation purposes) for a year.
Perhaps that could be an option for you.

Pete Helgren


Joe Pluta wrote:

From: Pete Helgren

Aren't you a legacy user of Query/400 and entitled to a "free" upgrade?
I thought current users of Query/400 on SWMA got a license for Web Query
for free.

New machine, Pete. Not the Monster 270 I've been fighting with the last
month and a half. This is my development platform.

Joe