Re: SAA Historical perspective and education

Thanks James

----- Original Message -----
From: "James W. Kilgore" <qappdsn@attglobal.net>
To: <rpg400-l@midrange.com>
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2002 11:58 PM
Subject: Re: SAA Historical perspective and education


> Dare,
>
> Since noone else has answered it, I'll give it a try.
>
> For starters SAA stands for Systems Application Architecture and was
> introduced in 1987.
>
> SAA was intended to be an application design model to permit the
> application to run on more than one platform.  (IMO, the biggest problem
> with SAA is that it had go lowest common denominator, so no external
> files)
>
> The OS/400 operating system displays some of the SAA concepts.  The
> Common User Access (CUA) was a set of guidelines for display components
> and general layout along with common function key assignments.  It is
> because of SAA that both the AS/400 and most DOS based PC programs used
> F3 to exit.
>
> It also explained IBM's command naming convention of action-object and
> recommended that applications used the object-action syntax to not only
> avoid potential conflicts, but to avoid "modes" when working with files.
>
> It defined the components of data entry panels and the "WRK" display
> panels.  Even back in 1990 IBM published Red Books on how to have menu
> bars and drop down menus and pop up windows long before they were
> available DDS keywords.  The idea was to make a green screen look and
> behave as close as possible to a DOS PC session.
>
> One of the goals of SAA was to break a program model into "Distributed
> program logic, Distributed data, and Distributed presentation and
> dialog".  To me, this sounds pretty much like what we are all still
> trying to do.
>
> There were also guidelines on how to structure your code for isolation
> to facilitate replacement at a future time.  Things like display file
> indicators.
>
> At that time, the AS/400 folks were not about to give up the things that
> were near and dear to them like external file definitions, a REFFLD in
> DDS that was lacking in SQL and subfiles.
>
> Now that lack of the above is not earth shattering, it's pretty much
> what everyone lived with on the S/36.
>
> And that is what made SAA die on the vine.  For S/36 shops they wanted
> what the AS/400 had to offer, the mainframers weren't getting anything
> new and who used RPG on OS/2?
>
> HTH
>
>
> "Dare @ Work" wrote:
> >
> > Bob, Hans and rest
> >
> > 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?
> >
> _______________________________________________
> This is the RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries (RPG400-L) mailing list
> To post a message email: RPG400-L@midrange.com
> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options,
> visit: http://lists.midrange.com/cgi-bin/listinfo/rpg400-l
> or email: RPG400-L-request@midrange.com
> Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives
> at http://archive.midrange.com/rpg400-l.
>