Re: Future of RPG was: Open Access for RPG Syntax

I think we might actually agree with each other more than we think.
The issue we are having right now is with black and white statements.
For example, there are many OO things that only muddy the waters in
business logic programming. On the flip side, OO things are VERY nice
for building frameworks concerning extensibility. RPG's purpose is
business programming and NOT framework programming (even though that
is what I build most of my server-side frameworks with).

Note that I am not trying to get RPG to run on the desktop or in the
browser or on a handheld device - that would be a waste of time and I
will instead adopt the flavor of the year for the UI layer and build a
degree of separation between my RPG and the UI. What I am saying is
that I agree with you that we shouldn't be using RPG for everything
except at least *attempt* to use it for everything on the server side,
because in reality there is very little it can't do on the server
side.

For this reason, I firmly believe in taking the wide view.

If taking a wide view means using the best tool/language for the job
on a project by project basis, then that IT dept will have tremendous
personnel growth for all the wrong reasons. For example, I believe
that in many cases it would be better to convert entirely to PHP vs.
trying to come up with a solution where large chunks of PHP are
communicating with large chunks of RPG. A scenario like that might be
a stepping stone, but it shouldn't ever be a 10yr goal of an IT shop
in my opinion.

Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
http://mowyourlawn.com/blog/



On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 8:16 AM, John McKay <jmckay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Aaron,

I have been on many sites, and every ISeries site was also an MS site ....
Perhaps my phrasing could have been better.

As regards speaking about RPG in relation to OO and UML, while RPG does
conform to many aspects of OO and the ISeries is an object-oriented
architecture, these two concepts (OO and UML) represent the landscape of
software development today and into the future, in which RPG and other
application languages have a place.  If we ignore them because they are not
RPG-centric, we are doing ourselves and our customers / users a dis-service,
while at the same time seriously curtailing our own future prospects.

The ISeries is probably the best database computer system around, and RPG is
the best application language for this platform.  However, RPG does not
satisfy every facet of the varied world of computing today   A computer
system is not a stand-alone system any more, and communication across
systems is the norm.  For this reason, I firmly believe in taking the wide
view.

Regards,
John McKay    mba