RE: What do I use?

From: Paul Raulerson

The comparison in terms of "thick" client is something on the order
of Visual Age Developer, which isn't something most RPG programmers
are going to come in contact with. This is pretty much were EGL
descended from. It can generate a full fledged application, including
all the UI interfaces, and runs through CICS. It's getting a bit long
in the tooth, and Rational is now grafted on to it with an Eclipse
front end. I used VA/GEN pretty much in the late 90's and very early
part of this decade.

Uh... you haven't kept up with the tool at all. It's now a fully functional
Java-based generation tool. It is actually the focus of a significant
portion of IBM's development strategy, and the enhancements you'll see over
the next few years will be quite impressive.

One thing: to call EGL long in the tooth and then promote Citrix, which was
created back around 1989 or 1990, is pretty funny :).

It doesn't take much, if any, longer to get someone able to do the
same with VARPG, or indeed, even with Visual Basic or any of the
other applications languages out there.

There's a huge difference between page-oriented and event-driven screens.
It's very difficult to teach someone the way to properly design a
multi-panel, widget-rich environment. You can teach someone how to do
thick-client 5250 panels, but to teach them to build the rich, interactive
graphic applications you're talking about takes a long, long, long time.

Few programmers of ANY ilk (and I consider RPG programmers to be some of the
strongest programmers around) find it easy to create intuitive user
interfaces of the level of Microsoft desktop applications. That's why
there's really only one major Open Source competitor.

The real alternative is application servers - like Citrix or NX.
Deployment takes even less time than the typical deployment time for
a WebSphere application, and screen display is far less dependent
upon network and local processing resources.

Nah. I don't see X-Windows style interfaces flourishing. Too low-level.
You're going to need a standardized widget presentation language patterned
after HTML (something lie XUL) so that the presentation side can format the
stream as it needs.

And as far as I can tell, the licensing for Citrix is horrendous. How in
the world are you going to support 10,000 users for Citrix? Does everyone
get a CAL? Or do you just run out of CALs during your peak business times?

It has everything to do with sluggish from our perspective. Can you
send me some links or additional detail on web apps that fast offline
please? (P a u l [at] Raulersons dot com)
We typically cannot even get a browser or Java application to refresh
a display that quickly. That kind of speed would be a big factor in
our evaluations. And that is using the internal gigabit network - lag
and queuing delay over the WAN make it miserable for complex screens.

What's so hard? Write a simple servlet that updates a counter and outputs
it to a JSP. Have the JSP show the counter and a button. When the button
is hit, go back to the servlet.

Create a JavaScript function to check for the page down key. When it senses
the page down key, it presses the button. Start the application, hold down
the page down key. Unless you have some serious latency issues, that page
should update the counter many times a second.

I do this with my PSC product. I web-enable subfiles and even over a WAN we
get sub-second response time.

Joe