AW: Less RPG in our shop

If you want to distribute your information (letters) to various channels in different formats then XML and XSLT is one possible way to go.

I'm doing some XML+XSLT myself to produce some documentation (docbook) and it works really nice once you have a good stylesheet.

For the performance: you could setup a tomcat server which does the transformation and returns the document. This way the performance is not as bad as starting a jvm,etc... for every transformation.

Just my opinion

Regards

Mihael Schmidt

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] Im Auftrag von David FOXWELL
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 18. März 2009 13:35
An: RPG programming on the IBM i / System i
Betreff: Less RPG in our shop

Hi list,

I wrote a post recently where I mentioned that I was using XSL in conjunction with XML documents created by RPG programs.

I am worried when I see the amount of programming in the XSL files that is effectively taken out of the RPG program.

An example : the RPG program writes out a date :

<transactionDate>2009-03-12</transactionDate>

The XSL file will use its own functions, written by the developper, to transfer this date to be used accordingly. That might mean convert to 12th march 2009, 12/03/2009, or the date might be used for calculations.

The RPG program is essentially just doing the database access, and the XML the display.

I would like your opinions on this subject. Am I wrong to say that the RPG program should do as much of the processing as possible? The XML is not destined for use anywhere else but our own shop. We are fundamentally an RPG shop with as of yet limited XSL ressources ( 1 expert and ...me!) . And then why use XSL when you can choose RPG for the job? Also, there's the performance question : I cannot believe that XSL would be anything other than sluggish by comparison to well - written RPG. On my PC, I've measured up to 7 seconds to transform an XML file and so generate one letter.

All our output to internet or paper is to end up going this RPG to XML way.

Although it's lovely springtime weather here in sunny Strasbourg!

Thanks.