Re: What skills should you have?

Bryce Martin wrote:

I haven't had a chance to play with RDB or EGL for that matter. And maybe those are useful tools for development. It seems to me there is a lot of up front work to get the ROI on this type of development. It sounds like it works best in a shop that is willing to convert their whole development environment.

Nope. Basically I teach people to use EGL as SDA for the Web. Since it uses metadata to build the screens, the EGL WYSIWYG web designer is faster than any other web designer out there, especially for business applications. If your business logic is encapsulated it callable programs, you're done. This way, your shop typically needs one or two EGL web developers, while everybody else concentrates on the business logic. Those who choose to never learn EGL are still productive members of the team.

Or, you can just as easily write SQL to access data - on any machine in your network, not just the i. Use that to build ad hoc inquiries. Quite cool.

And finally, if you're so inclined to move away from RPG, I suppose you could rewrite all your business logic in EGL. I heartily recommend against this approach, but it's an option.

EGL is unique in providing both legacy investment protection and future proofing.

How pretty is the finished product?

Beautiful. :)

How easy is it to customize the look and feel of the finished product?

Everything is class-based. You can assign classes to both thin and thick client artifacts.

Does this require CSS shills?

What's a CSS shill?

How about dynamic data support via AJAX?

Supported in both thin client and Rich UI. Obviously, required in Rich UI, which supports both SOAP and RESTFul services.

These are questions that could be answered by myself if I had the software to play with, I'm sure. But that is not the case for me right now, so I pose these questions. Any great examples of sites out there that were created via EGL/RDB?

For success stories, I suggest the IBM web site. Google EGL Cafe.

Joe