Re: From RGP to ¿Java?

Pepito,

I am working with a customer to tune an i for an EGL application right now.

Never, ever, underestimate the infrastructure you will need to handle EGL.
While you may be able to make a pretty UI with EGL in less than 70 lines of
code, you will have to hire a large additional staff to handle the support
issues. Your development and support costs will skyrocket with an EGL
developed application.

You will need WAS support staff. You will need Unix support staff. You will
need skilled Java developers. You will need IBM i performance experts. You
will need IBM i DB2 performance experts. You will need network experts. And
you will need people to manage this whole entire menagerie to be sure the
integration between all these environments and applications are working.

And while Rational support EGL, they do not appear to support all the
required infrastructure to handle an EGL developed application. If you need
your WAS to be supported, in order to run your EGL application, you will
have to get help from WAS people - not Rational. It is not in their area of
expertise, and it can take you a lot of time to find the right people to
support your entire new infrastructure. Be prepared to spend a lot of time
trying to get support from all the various parts of IBM and/or your UNIX
supplier to implement and manage your application.

If you are a large organization with Java skills, WAS skills and an
understanding of performance across your infrastructure, then EGL will suit
you. Otherwise, a pretty UI may end up costing you far more than you ever
expected.

Trevor

On 5/8/09 9:45 AM, "Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

By far the fastest and easiest way to create web applications is to use
EGL. I just did a demonstration in Raleigh where I create an entire
multi-tiered application, including both thin-client JSF and rich
client, in under an hour. The application displayed an array of
customers in a grid, and called an RPG program to get the data.

Most of the scripting technologies can get you a "decent" page in thin
client. The trouble comes when you want something modern. If you're
going to go through all the effort of creating a modernized interface,
you need something that uses a framework like jQuery or Dojo. With EGL,
you can create a thin client interface in literally minutes. You can
also expose an EGL function as a web service with a few clicks. The
beauty of the language comes when you want to do rich client. EGL Rich
UI is pretty hard to beat.

You can see some information about it here:

http://www-949.ibm.com/software/rational/cafe/community/egl/rui

IBM Rich UI has a decent set of widgets, but more importantly it's very
easy to extend to use other frameworks. As an example, here's a
dashboard I mocked up in a couple of hours using Dojo:

http://www.plutabrothers.com/PBDWeb/EGL/Dashboard.png

Took about 70 lines of code; I'm writing an article about it for Search/400.

I can attach this to back end logic and have the entire thing up and
running in a day or two, using a WYSIWYG editor to put the pieces
together. I don't think there's another tool that you can get that will
do this. And the final huge benefit? The tooling used to develop this
little project (RDi-SOA) will also let you maintain and debug the RPG
back end.

Joe

i have a business aplication developed with RPGIV (also using CL, PRT,
PF and DSP) and now I need to modernise the aplication.
If you done the same, please comment your experience.
I've tinked rewrite the application in Java or Python?
What graphic interface?