Good comments Mark. Really, you brought it home because so much depends on
the situation and knowledge of any given individual or organization. It's
very relative to what is trying to be accomplished. Finding the strengths
in a tool and using them is where it's at.
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Murphy, Mark
Sent: Friday, January 04, 2008 10:56 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: RE: And so it continues...
From: Buck
It's nothing particularly deep I'm saying here. If these shops had web
experience, they'd already have their web apps deployed and they
probably won't be interested in switching to EGL. And if they were
interested, they probably don't need a tutorial on how to attach a JSP
to a data source. EGL in the System i market space seems aimed at web
newbies, and by definition they haven't got the skills (yet) to support
a web application.
We have no argument, no disagreement. All I ever said was that this
community ought to spend more time on the basics and less time on 'new,
now easier than ever before!'
From: Joe
Okay, I see your point. If folks understood JSF completely, they could
hand-code the JSF, and they could write the JSP Model 2 code that allows
them to pass data from an RPG program to the web page. And thus their
programs would be less fragile. Those people don't need EGL, so by
definition those that need EGL are the people least suited to use it.
It's a valid criticism.
I disagree, because that assumes that code generated from a tool is more
fragile than something that
is hand coded. It is just not necessarily true. Fact is that you can get
both good and bad code from
both tools and hand coding. I don't use a tool because I need to; I use a
tool because it makes me
more productive. If that weren't true everyone would be using notepad for
all their development work.
True a lot of people still use PDM and SEU, but even SEU gives a little
advantage over Notepad due to
its prompting and syntax checking support. Yet while I prefer WDSC to SEU,
I prefer tools like CA 2E
and CA Plex because they make using pretested templates easier than WDSC
does. (BTW Buck, as an aside
you might be happy to note that 2E no longer generates a RTVOBJ subroutine
for each use of the
function.) The simple truth is that the tools make my life easier. Does a
tool make a programmer out
of anybody? Not a chance. I've seen examples of that as well. Tools do
make programmers more
productive, and in this world of cost cutting, that is a good thing. A good
programmer using a good
code generator will run rings around an equally good programmer that is hand
coding everything. And
assuming both programmers are equally good, the resulting code from the
generator will be at least as
robust and likely more consistent than the hand written code.
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