RE: IBM not investing in i5/OS was: iSociety

From: Richard Schoen

You're never boring Joe :-)

Long time no see buddy, sorry I missed you in Vegas this year.

Yeah, in order to get home in time to Trick or Treat with the little guy I
basically had a session in every slot from Sunday morning to Tuesday
afternoon. I did the all-day Jumpstart on WDSC, and then four presentations
and three hands-on labs.

I'll have to take a little look at EGL. You got me curious. If you can
affect one person it's all worth it :-)

It's fantastic. I've been a little reticent about it because I wanted to
make sure that it was truly integrated with the System i. The support they
have for RPG is very good (in fact, it's fantastic functionally, I just
don't like the configuration process), and now they're working on business
graphics (already in 7.0 you can add a graph by dragging it onto the page
and then dragging an array onto the graph).

As a System i (AS400 :-) ) community member I say we already have a
graphical interface for the iSeries - HTML for the web, Windows or
Java/RCP apps for Java. We can still use RPG with all of them and the
world is good.

Yup, me too. And if you have a solid business case to use RPG-CGI or PHP,
great, but remember that the direction of IBM (and a good portion of the
world) is J2EE. The title of this thread is "IBM not investing in i5/OS"
and the point is they ARE investing in i5/OS, they're just not investing in
the 5250 paradigm.

I don't see any other platforms that do much else other than the above
for interfaces, except of course the iSeries and green screen or other
platforms with Telnet emulators.

The next thing will be pure JavaScript on the client side so that it's
completely server agnostic as well as platform agnostic (depending on how
well your JavaScript works with the various browsers <grin>). We're already
seeing that with mashups, and of course Silverlight is Microsoft's
proprietary answer to that.

I'm still waiting for young Aaron Skywalker to give us GUI for the
iSeries.

I think he's brewing something there in Mankato. Do tell Aaron..... :-)

Yeah, I'd be interested in that myself.

Joe