RE: What do I use?

So? Building mission critical applications on a web browser is ... well...
it ain't always, or even *usually* a good idea. Sometimes it can be
downright criminal.

Sure, that goes against the "common wisdom" floating around these days, but
then, who really wants to be common anyway? I prefer my production
applications to be utterly rock solid.

Besides, the "nightmare" you refer to was solved by Sun in the early 1980s,
and was implemented in the Microsoft crazed world as Citrix, and Terminal
Server, and NX and a half dozen other application servers. All of which may
application deployment a snap, and run applications on remote thin clients
*fast*.

-Paul


-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Walden H. Leverich
Sent: Friday, April 13, 2007 9:23 AM
To: RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: RE: What do I use?

To the original poster, go ahead and use Visual Age for RPG.

Ok, yes, to get back to the OP's question. I'm in the opposite camp.
Unless you're building an app that needs to work disconnected from your
servers (user @ 30,000 ft.) or building something like Word,
World-of-Warcraft, iTunes, or Photoshop DON'T BUILD THICK CLIENT!

Non-browser-based apps are a return to the nightmare that was
client-server. No matter how "standard" the deployment environment is
you'll spend lots of time figuring out why the app behaves differently
on different machines. At a minimum there are 5 versions of W2K (no SP
-> SP4) 3 of XP (no SP -> SP2), Pre W2K if you want to support it, and
now what 6 versions of Vista? Add into that (if you care) how many
versions of Office? At least 4, O2K, OXP, O2K3, O2K7. Testing and
deployment is a bear.

-Walden