RE: RPG is Dead? Say it aint so!

From: Jeff Young

Just heard at my local user group that at Common, "top IBMers" had told a
"vocal proponent of RPG" when asked when we would be getting major
enhancements like direct GUI and WEB ability, that IBM was no longer
enhancing RPG and that all future development is going to other "newer"
languages.

Well, first off, I'd like real names because then I can specifically ask the
people at IBM what they meant. Second, I spent some great time last week
with some of the top folks in the Rational for System i group (the folks who
own the tools and compilers for System i) and they are committed to RPG.

That being said, you are unlikely to ever see a "native" GUI for RPG, any
more than you will see one for C, C++ or COBOL. What you will see is a
concerted effort to integrate RPG as a server-side language into IBM's GUI
strategy, which is centered on EGL.

The new version of EGL has not only browser capabilities, but also a rich
client capability that may well leapfrog over anything else available. I
haven't had enough time to play with it yet, though, to determine whether it
lives up to the hype. But the time I've spent with the powers that be in
the EGL and Rational teams leads me to believe that they care about the
System i and they really want System i developers to be able to use these
new tools for their UI needs.

So, is RPG dead? Heck no. But is RPG the strategic delivery mechanism for
UI programming? Nope. And frankly that's as it should be. RPG is the
perfect choice when you have one dedicated, specific UI device and not so
good when you have lots of UI types (just trying to code for different
display sizes was a nightmare). In this day of ever-changing UI
requirements (cell phones, anyone?), I think it's better to separate out the
UI rendering, and leave the business logic to RPG.

Joe