RE: 'green screen' not sellable

"IMHO, this attitude of "IBM i can only do green screen" comes from working
with programmers who are 20 years behind the times and unwilling to try
anything new. Fire those people, they are holding you back"

While there are some that are "unwilling to try anything new", I would say
there are more that are "unable to try anything new. I would blame this
more on corporations that refuse to spend the time or money to let you learn
how to do the new stuff as well as IBM for not providing a reasonably priced
way for us to have a machine to do it on our own (and I know that last point
has been beat to death so I won't climb on my soapbox).

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Alan
Campin
Sent: Monday, June 08, 2015 12:52 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: 'green screen' not sellable

"IMHO, this attitude of "IBM i can only do green screen" comes from working
with programmers who are 20 years behind the times and unwilling to try
anything new. Fire those people, they are holding you back"

Boy ain't that true. It's not the machine that is killing the i, it's the
people who won't change. I started with a new company and watching the i die
because the people won't change and are still trying to write code from the
1980's and wondering why they are looking to write off the i. We were
interviewing for new ILE developers. Could find 4 who actually knew what ILE
was out of a 100.

On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 9:45 AM, Scott Klement <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

IMHO, they are not thinking this through clearly.

If the goal is to have a web interface, there are many (hundreds) of
ways to do that purely on IBM i. Why would you want to introduce a C#
interface and a Windows server to the mix? Now you have to maintain
two platforms all the time. This increases the expense and complexity
of maintaining your application tenfold.

Granted, if your goal is to not use IBM i at all (eliminate the
database and backend issues so it's purely on Windows, or is
cross-platform -- though C# will not likely make it cross-platform)
then there's some advantages to that approach -- mainly that it opens
you up to a wider range of customers. But, you will also be open to a

much stronger competition.

And you will have more problems with things like reliability that
bring with them a lot of hidden costs.

If you like IBM i and just want a web interface, why not do the web
stuff on IBM i instead of Windows?

There's nothing web-based you can do on Windows that you can't do just
as easily and just as well on IBM i. RPG can do web as well as any
other language. <vendor>I work for a company that is in this business..

see

message from Brian May</vendor> Even if you don't want to go with a
commercial package, though, RPG can do web well with CGIDEV2 (if you
don't mind coding it), or many traditional web environments are
available such as Java, PHP, Ruby and Node.js.

IMHO, this attitude of "IBM i can only do green screen" comes from
working with programmers who are 20 years behind the times and
unwilling to try anything new. Fire those people, they are holding you

back.

On 6/8/2015 9:36 AM, Hoteltravelfundotcom wrote:

I was talking Friday with an owner of a company that has billing
software for a particular industry.
Where there are frequent, government and insurance changes they have
to apply.

Their software is based on RPG. He said they want to rewrite in C#
because they cannot sell to new customers.
OK fair enough but do you think C# based is the way to go? Secondly
he said that they will keep the data on the IBM I.

Actually I have been working with mobile apps lately connecting a
desktop system using Delphi and I was thinking this might be a better
way for them to get their product to the public relatively sooner.
Taking a complicated old database from ibm I and trying to fit in C#
I think it hard but what are their choices?

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