From: Peter Dow (ML)
Hi Joe,
I've been skipping a lot of this because I don't have access to EGL, but
then you state that "finally IBM has given us a decent GUI interface".
Where is it? And if IBM is giving it to us, why is Rational supporting
it? At least that's the implication I hear when you say "neither of
those is going to get the same tooling support, especially not from
Rational."
Rational is part of IBM. IBM bought Rational five years ago almost to the
day, and have been steadily integrating the developers and their products
into what they've already developed via the earlier purchase of Object
Technology International (which was five or six years before that, and led
to Eclipse).
IBM has pretty much consolidated all of its language tooling under the
Rational umbrella, so if you don't like what Rational is doing, you're not
going to be very happy with IBM. And what Rational is doing is EGL. EGL is
IBM's primary focus and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
Expect to see EGL submitted to the appropriate standards bodies before long.
Mostly what I'd like to hear is that yes, IBM is giving us this
wonderful GUI, and it's included with all the compilers etc. I'm
guessing that it's not. I'd love to play with some of this stuff.
We'd all love to hear that IBM is forever going to give us all these tools
for free. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen. Instead, what's going
to happen is "granularization", as Mike Smith calls it (or "unbundling", as
Bob Cancilla terms it). You can read about some of those topics in my
article here:
http://www.mcpressonline.com/mc?.6b50aa96
But in general you're going to end up paying for the features you need. The
hope is that this will eventually lead in a decrease of costs to the end
user, and while I personally hate it, I see the writing on the wall. The
prices aren't yet fixed, but my guess is you will pay a few hundred bucks a
year per seat for the tooling.
Right now, you CAN get a free trial of the package. The problem is that the
Rational folks tend to treat System i developers like PC developers and
think we can make a decision in 60 days. As you well know, we can barely
find the spare time to install the tooling and get Hello World to work in 60
days, and I'm trying to make that point clear to the powers that be over
there. I do know that the topic is at the top of the list for the EGL
development team (I know, because I keep bringing it up <grin>).
I did get to sit in on a training session for RPGsp, which seems to have
a pretty nice IDE, and lots of wizards for generating typical programs,
but I haven't actually used it to do anything that anyone would use in
production yet.
I can't say anything about RPGsp functionally, or RPG server pages, or any
other third party products as I don't use them. But I can say this: EGL is
IBM's strategic direction for ALL platforms, so if you plan to use something
other than EGL, be it RPG-CGI, PHP or a third party solution, then you had
better have a solid business reason for it. I'm not saying there aren't
good reasons to use another solution, but right now EGL is the default.
Joe
midrange.com
