RE: SAA Historical perspective and education

The concept of "lowest common denominator" is key to achieving portability.
We S/38-types tooled merrily along with our multi-format logicals, etc. and
hoped the rest of The World would catch up to us.

-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-admin@midrange.com [mailto:rpg400-l-admin@midrange.com]On
Behalf Of boldt@ca.ibm.com
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2002 1:27 PM
To: rpg400-l@midrange.com
Subject: Re: SAA Historical perspective and education

Dare wrote:
>I should have known with my 12 years on AS/400.
>Could someone lecture me on SAA. What is it? How is it used? What are the
>Pros and Cons? What happen to it?

SAA stood for "Systems Application Architecture", and was meant
to be a framework for developing (reasonably) portable applications
on IBM systems.  One of the things I did not throw out before our
move to the new lab building in Markham was a copy of the "SAA
Overview" book (5th edition, December 1990).  I'm not sure if there
ever was an official statement to the effect that SAA is dead, but
basically I don't think anyone really cares anymore.  In some ways,
though, SAA is is still alive since some products (like RPG III and
SQL) still include flagging of non-SAA elements.

Was it ever really put into practice?  I really don't know since
that would require a case of successfully moving an application
from one SAA platform to another with little effort.

What were the pros and cons?  The pro is that you can port an app
relatively easily between different IBM platforms.  There were a
lot of cons:  A lot of powerful platform specific functionality
was missing from SAA, and so you really had to force yourself
into using a narrow subset of the functionality available to you.
Initially, AS/400 (and S/38) programmers were up in arms since
there was very little in SAA that midrange programmer could use.

Cheers!  Hans

Hans Boldt, ILE RPG Development, IBM Toronto Lab, boldt@ca.ibm.com

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