From: albartell
My complaint was with what your original statements of EGL involved (i.e.
zero hand coding of anything), which led me to believe you were dancing in
strawberry fields.
Which statement??? Can you point to it? I don't remember saying anything
like that. The bitch that a few people have always had with JSP Model 2 is
that they have to write some Java. Even though it's minimal (literally a
few hundred lines for the whole system), I've gotten pushback that any Java
is too much Java.
So I show you EGL, in which there is NO Java code required. Zero, zilch,
nada. So the server side of the equation is entirely Java free. You create
records, call RPG programs, and that's it. I think that's completely
addressed the issue of server-side Java, correct? And that's the only place
where I really mean no code at all, although as I'll explain there's ALMOST
no coding REQUIRED for the user interface either.
So now we get to the UI. This is where the confusion came in, and to be
honest I didn't think this would be an issue, because with PHP or RPG-CGI or
pretty much anything else, you have to first write all the HTML and
JavaScript yourself (or use an external HTML editor, but you get my point).
Then you have to manually insert PHP code or RPG-CGI tags to get the data
out of variables, and then finally you have to write the RPG code or the PHP
code that populates those variables.
But you still have to write all the HTML and JavaScript yourself. So I was
completely blindsided when you started complaining about JavaScript. Heck,
with scripting languages it's going to take you quite some work just to
write the code that gets data out of your program and into the page and back
again. With EGL you don't have to do any of that.
With EGL you have a WYSIWYG editor that does all the plumbing; that is, it
allows you to define the variables in your EGL program, and then use a
graphical editor to drag and drop those variables onto a JSP page, where the
editor will paint the screen and generate ALL the HTML and JSF tags required
to move the data between the JSP page and the EGL code.
With that you can build entire applications. Heck, there's a wizard that
will build a complete CRUD application for you, so you can see how it's
done. Zero hand-coding. With version 7, they included Ajax support; with
the WYSIWYG editor you can define a portion of your page to be Ajax-updated,
and then tie an Ajax request to an event. That will trigger a return to the
EGL code, in which you can update the data, which will in turn update the
JSP page, again all without you hand-coding a single line of HTML or Java or
even JavaScript.
Now, for more intense stuff, like maybe accessing a web service or including
a third-party JavaScript widget or other things that aren't part of the base
package, you might have to add your own JavaScript. But you'd have to write
that stuff in ANY language. You can't expect the IDE to magically handle
all possible UI code. And because you have to do that in RPG-CGI or PHP as
well, I thought that was just taken for granted, so I apologize for assuming
you understood what I meant.
But look through what I've written above. You CAN write entire applications
with excellent graphics and full Ajax capabilities connected to an RPG back
end (or using pure SQL calls to DB2 data, for that matter), all without
hand-coding a single line of Java or HTML. That capability is simply
unmatched by any other tool or architecture.
You may need to do some hand coding for advanced features, but you have to
agree that you would have to do that for every other approach as well. So
that still leaves EGL head and shoulders above anything else, and it may
even be enough to convince you that J2EE isn't all bad. <smile>
Joe
midrange.com
