GKern@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
"Okay, Scott, I'll bite: What do you suggest?"
I'm not Scott but from an article I read this morning by Jon Paris and
Susan Gantner:
"What skills should you have as a minimum?
Modern RPG IV, subprocedures, use of C and Java functions from
RPG, embedded SQL, XML processing, etc.
Modern development tools such as IBM's RDi
A modern Web programming language such as PHP, Java, or .NET, plus
the ability to interface them with RPG business logic
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Respectfully, that's a bit of overkill. No one person needs to know all
of that unless you're the jack of all trades for your company, and
frankly unless you've got a whole lot of spare time on your hands,
you're not going to learn all of it.
You absolutely need a solid grounding of RPG IV and ILE concepts, with
free format being a high priority. You should know BIFs inside and out,
and there are a few C functions that will help you. SQL is crucial.
And of course you should know RDP.
After that, it's very much a mix and match that depends on your goals
and those of your company. If you're a true Blue shop, Java is the next
language to learn, although the enforced object orientation and pure
class-based environment is a huge jump from the world of RPG.
HTML, CSS and JavaScript? In general, you should only need enough to be
able to understand a basic web page. If you use EGL you need to know
very little of these things. On the other hand, if you're going to use
a scripting language like PHP, you'll need to become quite expert,
because you'll effectively be using PHP to generate JavaScript, often to
generate HTML.
If you're in a Microsoft shop, learn enough about .NET to know how to
talk to those folks. Then, concentrate on delivering your business
logic as web services and/or stored procedures. Do not, I repeat, do
not worry about Java.
XML depends on your business. Generating XML is a piece of cake,
parsing is a royal pain. Do you as an RPG programmer need to be parsing
XML documents? Not necessarily. But certainly you should know what it
does and how to read XML data, if only to be sure you're getting what
you think you're getting. Plus it's a little different depending on
whether you're using XML in web services or you're doing some other sort
of data transfer. Because (you knew I'd get to this, right?) if you
know EGL, you can create web services with literally a dozen lines of
code, and then pass that data to your RPG programs as data structures,
no XML knowledge needed.
So yeah, you need to expand your horizons. But there are easy ways and
hard ways, and no matter what, you should know what your career goals
are, because those goals will definitely help you decide what you need
to learn.
Joe
midrange.com
