Re: RPG and Web.. (was Using OO concepts in RPG) -- RPG400-L

Brad Stone wrote:

Funny, I remember arguing this with both of you, but none of your reasons stick in my mind. Not to start another thread here, but if RPG is wrong, then that makes a lot of other languages wrong, since RPG is "not only a report generating language". ...

Now Brad, you know better than to invite people to provide examples of better tools for web page generation! ;-)

Joe is much better qualified to discuss the Java alternatives, so I'll leave that angle to him.

In the past, I've offered examples of how Python (as another alternative) can be better for web page generation. For example, I discussed translating a published ~200 line RPG program into an equivalent ~100 line Python program. (I could have reduced the size further, but to keep the comparison fair, I kept the overall structure and comments of the RPG program.) Well, actually, it wasn't exactly eqivalent, since the Python program did not include the three obvious bugs present in the RPG program.

I also described how I implemented a web server in 7 lines of Python code. I wrote that to compare the HTTP request headers sent out by a couple of different browsers, and it seemed like the easiest approach at the time. (Later, I realized I could have just queried the environment variables set by Apache.) Anyways, 3 LOC instantiated a web server, the other 4 LOC overrode a request method to display the headers.

And more recently, I offered a short sample program showing how one might implement the "template" technique in Python. Again, much much simpler and easier to understand than the equivalent in RPG. Believe it or not, but templating in Python doesn't even require importing any of the functionality of the Python class library!

Anyways, it's not really my goal here to push Python. I only offer these as examples of just one particular tool that's more appropriate to the task. Python is simply my language of choice for my hobby programming. I'm currently playing with Python to write some tools to organize my photos. Again, another example of easy HTML document generation!

Now as far as I can tell, the only advantage offered by RPG in web programming is that RPG programmers don't have to learn another language, only how to use available procedure libraries. But if you do a lot of web programming, surely there's a point where the productivity gained by learning a more appropriate tool overcomes any initial advantage in starting with the language you already know.

Cheers! Hans

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