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

[Hans Boldt <boldt@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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