Re: EGL RichUI Was:Re: From RGP to ¿Java?

Nope, you didn't miss anything, Pete. The fundamental difference between rich clients and thin clients is that with a thin client, all logic is on the host, including generating the user interface. That's why simple scripting languages like PHP and RPG-CGI can handle thin client. With rich client, the UI logic resides on the client in the browser. You in effect send down a program that builds widgets (this is actually fairly close to what Aaron Bartell is pushing for), and then that logic requests data in chunks from the host.

It is those requests for data that require AJAX and thus a web services approach. Now technically you could write those services however you wanted and parse the data yourself, but with EGL you simply specify the record layout - using the SAME syntax at both the rich client and the host level - and EGL does all the plumbing for you, formatting the data into either XML or JSON on the host, sending it down the wire, disassembling it on the client and populating the records for use in the widgets.

You have to see it to believe it.

Joe

One follow up question Joe.

It seems to me that EGL RUI requires a web services interface layer. Is that correct? Most of my "hand tooled" RUI apps use AJAX/JSON to talk to Java servlets. Would I be writing RPG service programs wrapped by web services for my EGL RUI apps or can I write directly to the DB? My question stems primarily from the ease with which you can create a CRUD app that goes "direct" to the DB in EGL vs using a RUI to access the data. RUI seemed to unnecessarily require a web service to handle the DB access where the non-RUI EGL method basically allowed you to point to the DB tables and it created all the I/O infrastructure quickly and easily. I was looking for the same "point to the table and go" ease of development in EGL RUI. Did I miss something?