Re: Broadening my horizons -- MIDRANGE-L

Hey Booth,

Apart from no support and having to run it on a virtual windows 7 box
VARPG is still kicking.

We developed a couple of modules for our application in it and still works
reliably - just becoming a nightmare when we have to do any maintenance
which thankfully is not that often. (But now that I have said that ...
Murphy's law will step in!!)

Cheers

Don Brown

From: Booth Martin <booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 22/10/2016 06:21 AM
Subject: Re: Broadening my horizons
Sent by: "MIDRANGE-L" <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

The area where I get in to trouble is in the very beginning part of
making a change. The "is it plugged in" stage. I find that is the case
with other programmers I have met. They know what they do but making a
Hello World in another discipline is not as easy as it seems.

I will add this, too. After learning 4 or 5 various approaches and then
watching them wither on the vine is discouraging (Anyone still using
VARPG?)

On 10/21/2016 2:33 PM, Vernon Hamberg wrote:

It depends what you mean by "old-school 5250/RPG shop" - we are a
5250/RPG shop that is by no means out-of-date - but if you mean a
place that still does RPGIII and will not let you call APIs - all that
- well, good luck.

If you mean that, by definition, 5250 & RPG are "old-school", I hope
you can adjust your thinking on that. Here we use RPG IV, some aspects
of ILE RPG, embedded SQL all over the place, several of Scott
Klement's tools for RPG, including IFS and POI, another set of things
for Excel from Giuseppe Costaglioli named SQL2JXL (for one) or
SQL2POI. We also use CGIDEV2 to generate very advanced XLSX workbooks
with efficient running, SFTP transfers, some JDBC stuff, I've
installed ImageMagick and GhostScript for recent challenges, - I don't
consider this "old-school" in any way - yes, we also have RPG II code
in production!

Several of our team use RDi for development, as well.

I for one have worked quite a bit with the Open Access for RPG
functionality that has let me work with remote databases, MySQL, SQL
Server, Oracle, etc. using native RPG I/O - there has not been a
commercial version until recently when I did some work for an ISV
along these lines. Some vendors have applications that can run your
applications through the OAR process and do amazing things.

I suggest for things to look at, there is Bruce Vining's book, APIs at
Work - nothing better out there on this. Then there are some older an
recent Redbooks - Jon Paris, et al., wrote one some time ago and have
a draft of a revision out there now - it was posted about in these
lists yesterday or this morning.

And of course the movement into open source that IBM are really
putting a stake in.

Lots of stuff to enjoy - and the languages and directions you mention,
yes, those are probably places to look for future viability - I will
admit to being in the over 30 generation by a bit - heh - and still
find delight in learning all manner of new stuff.

Much regards
Vern

On 10/21/2016 11:14 AM, Justin Taylor wrote:

I work for an old-school 5250/RPG shop, and I'm looking for ways to
broaden my horizons. I have basic Java skills, just finished a book
on Node, and have "Hello World" level skills in a few other
languages. Can anyone suggest good ways to improve? Right now, I
feel like a hammer without a nail.

Thanks

Justin Taylor