Re: How many of you will stay at V7R5 lower due to SDA removal ?

Assuming I can get my customers to V7R5, I'll advise they stay there for
the duration (i.e., V7R5 goes off maintenance, or they jump for a hardware
upgrade, or while they replatform--yes, that's a possibility).

IBM, you have some explaining to do. I don't care about the lawyers and
your consent decree days of being tight-lipped about what's in the future:
when you remove a development tool that's integral to a very large
percentage of interactive applications, your customers deserve an
explanation *and* a comparable replacement solution. RDi is good at a lot
of things but basically it's stamped out of the Websphere template: too
fat, too complicated, too slow, and too expensive. It does little of the
easy and important stuff easily and fast. We have to fight to get simple
IBM-induced problems fixed (remember saving LPEX preferences?). If dumping
SDA cures cancer or finds MH370, we can talk. If you want RLU, remember
the Rodney Dangerfield line: "Take my wife--please!"

RDi is not a satisfactory replacement for SDA. Period. Please keep SDA
part of V7R6 and beyond.

I have the greatest respect for the IBM'ers who support "our" product
line. But I have to wonder if their bosses--the people making some of
these product decisions--have ever coded and maintained a complex
line-of-business application on a system used in production by thousands
of users. In the artificial world of the lab, there are no thousand-mile
VPN connections: I doubt they experience a one-second delay for every line
of SQL code because RDi uses the host-based syntax checker for SQL (if SQL
is so doggone important, why hasn't the syntax checker been ported to RDi?).

Apparently a bunch of hobbyists figured out how to make VS Code do a pretty
good job of editing RPG code and they published their work for free in just
a couple of years (Hyperbole? Minimizing the seminal work done by
pioneers in our midst? Well, maybe). I've had the IDE burr under my
development saddle since the day I wrote to Buell Duncan praising CoDe/400
while decrying its instability. IBM, why can't you get this right? Oh,
wait--you did. And then you stopped upgrading SEU only to put us into the
WDSCI nightmare. Not that I don't use RDi every day--I do--and I use SEU
and SDA every day as well. I have a drawer full of screwdrivers in my
garage, I use them all sooner or later, and I never throw any away.

So send me the NDA and explain the business and technical considerations
for pulling SDA. I need to know if I should enroll in the "DB2 for z/OS"
class.



On Wed, Jul 23, 2025 at 9:42 PM Daniel Gross <daniel@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

No - even as we have at least 2 or 3 developers who are using SDA on a
regular basis, we will go to
7.6 when the next hardware switch (leasing) is due.

We are using RDi - and the few guys who are still maintaining 5250
applications with 5250 tools can switch today.

But we are also in the process of switching to VS Code / Code4i as our
primary IDE. And even if there is no 5250 designer, the combination of
editing DDS code and having a preview of the resulting screens would be
enough for most of our work. More often I find myself editing the DDS
manually in the designer, because it's a bit tedious to do a simple
COLOR(WHT) in the designer GUI. Also a 5250 designer is in the works right
now, and I think it will be available later this year.

And I think Code4i might even be an option for /36 maintenance - we (the
community) just needs to create syntax highlighting for OCL and maybe
RPG/II - both shouldn't be so hard, as the groundwork is already done.

Kind regards,
Daniel

Am 24.07.2025 um 05:41 schrieb Richard Schoen <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
:

I’m just curious how many of you folks will stay at V7R5 because of

this short sighted move or removing SDA and forcing RDI as an option or the
non-completed VS Code SDA alternative.

There’s no reason that SDA couldn’t have been left on the box for those

customers who are using it.

We have a number of older customers using S/36 environment code and I

don’t think I can advise them to go beyond V7R5 unless they are planning to
stop maintaining their green screen apps.

Interested in your thoughts.

Regards,
Richard Schoen
Web: http://www.richardschoen.net
Email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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