Modernizing applications (was: Explaining single level store to non i people)

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 20:44, <GKern@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

No - not at all. It was just a comment that it *seems to me* (and this is
only my opinion) that they are sort of "reinventing the wheel". I'd say
it's the vendor who's at fault for not recognizing what they are doing to
their customers.

They're doing what they can to stay in the game. It's impossible to
sell a business application that's still 5250 based.

I mean isn't it ironic that they are leaving a platform, that under the
covers gives the appearance of running every thing from RAM, (without
human intervention) to go to a platform that will actually run everything
in RAM and probably require human intervention in the form of a DBA,
security architect, and will require consultants for custom programming
since their RPG programmers can't even spell JAVA ?

You'll also need all this stuff if you're running a modern application
on your IBM i. If you decide to do that in RPG, you'll need to write
everything from scratch (which is what we did) or use building blocks
- of which RPG offers none for GUI developments, but Java does.

The reason why you could run 50 users on 192MB of RAM was because the
applications weren't intelligent, had no commitment control, no
integrity verification, etc. pp. This way, you can gain a lot of
performance.

But time has moved on. A good RPG developer can be proficient in Java
in half a year. Yes, it means that he has to invest some time to get
his head around new concepts, but then again that's how the
technologically field always was.