Re: RPG from IBM's Perspective

On 27-Jun-09, at 5:30 PM, rpg400-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

VARPG was not then and is not now targeted at moving people
away from IBM i. The exact opposite in fact.

No matter how one spins the marketing message, VARPG is a tool for creating, deploying, and running Windows applications. One may argue that it provides an interface with the IBM i database, but essentially the same is true for Microsoft's developer tools too.

Nathan, all I can say is that only one of the two of us was in the room during the meetings that determined what and why VARPG should be produced and it wasn't you. Please don't tell me why something was or wasn't done when you weren't there. There is no "marketing message" here. There was _never_ any intention with VARPG to move folks away from i. The exact opposite was true.

At the time a great many RPGers were beginning to use VB to build graphical applications that interfaced via OBDC etc. to DB2. To us in the languages group that signaled a threat because we knew that MS were intent on moving people off the platform. We wanted to give users a form of RPG that would allow the building of the graphical apps they could build with VB. I think you forget that at the time VARPG was invented, there was no Web 2.0 - browsers could not do the job without Java applets - and even then ... In fact the desire to _avoid_ OS2 and Windows was what drove the initial idea to have VARPG generate Java applets as an option instead of Windows executables. Sadly the size of the run-time components rendered this completely impractical.

Do I have ideas on the future of VARPG - yes and have talked about it with the team many times over many years.'


Jon Paris

www.Partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com