Re: Help! Boss wants to know why ILE?

Dennis,

You have received a lot of good pointers from everyone (!) on the list. Aaron makes a very good point that one does not have to jump off the deep end; it is possible (and, in my opinion, recommended) that ILE concepts be implemented gradually. For example, I use subprocedures even though, in most cases, a subroutine would work just as well (but, boy, do I love those local variables). I have yet to implement a service program, though.
A slightly different tack to the "you'll lose your staff if they can't improve their skills," is that "learning and using new techniques is fun." There's no rule or law that says programming has to be dull and boring. I daresay that 99% of all normal business applications could be written in RPG II - but who the heck would want to do that? Would your boss, who asked the original question, want to stick with RPG II even though it would work? Wasn't there an investment in moving to RPG III and, then, RPG IV?

By the way, what's the staff's (and boss') take on /free format? .-)


* Jerry C. Adams
*IBM System i5/iSeries Programmer/Analyst
B&W Wholesale Distributors, Inc.* *
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albartell wrote:

Recommendation: Start out with some simple ILE implementations and see "how
it feels". Many shops think it is all-or-nothing out of the box, and that
will only get you into trouble because you won't realize best practices
until you work with it. Test the waters with a small side project and see
how things go. I only develop *PGM objects when I want to have a program
callable from CLLE or from the command line, otherwise ALL of my development
is RPG *SRVPGM/*MODULE's.

HTH,
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com

-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of DennisRootes@xxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, April 23, 2007 4:09 PM
To: rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Help! Boss wants to know why ILE?

Please help me come up with some good examples as to what makes ILE better
than "business as usual". Here's what I've used so far:

1. It's faster - Rebuttal: doesn't matter we have plenty of cpu and our
machine screams as it is.
2. Service program equals reusability - Rebuttal: we can just use a
separate program for reusable code.
3. Local variables - Rebuttal: if they are inside a separate program it
doesn't matter.
4. System maintenance - Rebuttal: instead of service programs or
subprocedures we have separate pgms so it's the same thing.

It's not that the boss wants to stop us from using ILE, she just wants to
know what makes it so much better than plain 'ol RPG IV that she should
invest the man hours it's going to take to bring our whole dept up to speed
on ILE. And I just am not coming up with anything that's very convincing.

So please, if you have any good arguments, let me know.

Thanks,

Dennis
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