Re: RPG UI Frameworks was->RE: Fw: Enhancements to RPG

As I said in another post awhile back, RPG is fairly well suited for an
event driven UI framework because of procedure pointers and callback
capabilities. Just think if there was an RPG "router" program that front
ended your RPG program that had business logic and screen flow code. Every
time an event (e.g. specific customer selected from an HTML table) occurred
it would send the current form to the RPG router program on the server. The
router program would then gain entry into your RPG program by way of
procedure pointer (see example code below).

Aaron, these are great ideas, and the more you think about it the more
you can appreciate what object oriented programming is all about. One
thing a framework needs is the ability of an object to reflect back to
the framework what it is. When the framework can query the
AddressBookRow object to get a list of its properties and the prompt
text of each property, the framework can then display a generic prompt
dialog to the user for the entry of name, address, city, ...

the preprocessor part of the RPG compiler is very good and I think
could actually be used to add the language features to RPG that make
an object oriented framework doable. The thing holding us back has
been and still is the IBMers in Rochester who insist on selling slow,
expensive i5 hardware. Objects and frameworks need a lot of CPU.

-Steve