Re: Moving from Green screen app to GUI because of push back

[Booth Martin <booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I understand this sentiment and for a while agreed.  Then I decided to 
see just what could be done with the iSeries with freely available tools 
and current baseline technologies.  That exercise changed my mind.  Put 
it another way: what can programmers everywhere do today on other 
cross-platform applications that they can not do on the iSeries?  If we 
remove ourselves from the Microsoft & Apple platform, are we stuck? Is 
there enough good stuff out there that we can function just fine without 
Word & Excel?



On 12/12/2017 9:39 PM, mlazarus wrote:
> Tim,
>
>  I was discussing this subject recently with a very respected member 
> of this group.  We were both confused how turning over a crucial, and 
> I do mean crucial to the longevity of the system, piece of creating a 
> modern UI is turned over to third party vendors instead of being fully 
> integrated and included in the OS.
>
>  Some vendors have done an admirable job creating a product, but IMHO, 
> it's ridiculous to have to pay a large bundle extra to get what should 
> be included and easily integrated into the system.  It is also more 
> expensive to develop using (at least) some of these tools.  My 
> estimate is at least 25% longer to develop and test.
>
>   I have three clients that are jumping ship to a PC based platform, 
> another that has already gone in that direction (they used to have the 
> largest AS/400 config in the US northeast (which included 14 AS/400's) 
> and another is in the midst of moving part of their operation to a PC 
> based cloud system.  I haven't heard of a new member to the midrange 
> fold in a long time.  I would imagine that they exist, but I think 
> that 20+ years after the GUI became popular, for IBM not to include 
> this required functionality, plus the GUI development tools as part of 
> the base OS, is just plain foolish.
>
>  No offense to the tool vendors, but I believe that this functionality 
> is best integrated at a low level in the OS, not as a generic API in 
> order to get the best integration, debugging and performance.
>
>  -mark