Can you point me to some of the free rpg tools that do email. We have
been using CPYTOPCD and SNDDST to send attachments. What we are also
wanting is an easy way to fill the body of the email with html or just
text an email it directly. I know there must be a lot of ways of doing
this, but if someone has already created the wheel, I guess I don't want
to try to recreate it. Thanks for the help!
-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Scott Klement
Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2007 12:10 PM
To: RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: RE: calling mail.jar from rpg
Well, good question. I'm starting to use the Apache Poi Project for
creating spread sheets with the stuff that you wrote. I really like
it!
IMHO, it makes sense to use POI for Excel.
The file format of an Excel file is extraordinarily complex. Indeed,
the
name POI stands for "Poor Obfuscation Implementation" because the
programmer who wrote it thought that Microsoft must be trying to
obfuscate
their file format if they use something that complex. (He used the word
"poor" becuase he figured it out, so it must not have been that well
obfuscated to being with.)
Writing your own tools for Excel in native RPG would be a major, major
undertaking, and would probably take you years. Using POI spares you
that
work.
I just thought I use the mail.jar that sun put out and keep it as
close to rpg as possible so some of the other developers and I can
learn as we go.
Unlike Excel, E-mail is NOT complicated. And there are existing pure
RPG
tools for it that are free and you can download and use them.
Consequently, I don't see why you want to use Java for e-mail.
I keep coming back to this same point: If your goal is to "keep it as
close to RPG as possible" then why do you want to do it in Java?
To me, that's like saying "I want authentic Mexican food!" and then
getting on a plane and flying to Japan. There's nothing wrong with
Japan,
but Mexico would be a more logical place for authentic Mexican food.
In your stuff it doesn't look like you used anything but the classes
put out by the poi project.
I guess that depends on what you mean by "my stuff". If by "my stuff"
you mean the articles I wrote about POI, then you're right... I only
used
POI in my articles about POI.
If by "my stuff" you mean "my entire body of work", then you're wrong.
I've used lots of other things besides POI. I've presented multi-part
article series on JDBC from RPG and JFreeChart from RPG, neither of
which
have anything to do with POI, but both use Java classes.
Can't this same thing be done with the mailapi? I would just like to
know if it could be easily done, if not, that's fine. I want it
understandable to everyone in our iseries group so we can use some of
this.
I think you need to distinguish between whether something CAN be done
and
whether it SHOULD be done.
In my mind, it makes more sense to use RPG for e-mail, rather than have
RPG calling Java for e-mail.
midrange.com
