Re: Adoption of RPG OA

[Vern Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Larry

You've probably seen some of Jon's articles - he has been working the 
PRINTER file bit lately to Excel, I think, and to HTML.

To others, those are worth a look. His work demonstrates that writing a 
handler is not in and of itself a difficult thing, necessarily. The hard 
part is knowing WHAT to do with it, and determining whether a person has 
the chops for it.

Vern

On 3/11/2011 9:20 AM, Larry Ducie wrote:
> Hi Sam,
>
> <snip>
> RPG OA came out with a bang a year ago, and several vendors announced
> tools, some of which looked very good.  But it seems to have been
> relatively quiet since.  (Not to disparage articles by several people on
> the list and discussions here...)
>
>
>
>
> But has there been any adoption of RPG OA and the 3rd party vendor
> handlers and tools?  Is there a market developing that will sustain the
> vendors?  Anyone actually using a 3rd party handler, or even installed
> one for evaluation?
>
> </snip>
>
> We are currently 'evaluating'.
>
> Regarding RPG OA: I can see some scenarios where it will be a useful tool. As an example, we built a simple PF containing address details (number, street, suburb, state, zip/postal code, country) and geo-coordinates (latitude, longitude). We then created two LFs - one keyed by address details the other keyed by lat, long. We then built a handler to go to maps.google and get  the coordinates for the address or the address for the coordinates - depending on which LF we used. All done on a chain. Works a charm.
> We are now looking at display files to see what OA offers us in this space.
>
> Regarding use of Vendor products: The big-bang display conversion is just not going to happen here I think. I think there may be some things that would be beneficial - like a set of dummy PFs and handlers to allow the building/reading/ of excel spreadsheets as though they were F-specs:
>
> PFs:
> WORKBOOK
> WORKSHEET
> ROW
> COLUMN
> STYLE
> etc...
>
> Or the ability to easily print spreadsheets / word docs / PDFs / postscripts using an existing PRINTER file and handler.
>
> There is a always another option - Time for us to put our opensource hats on! :-)
>
> Cheers
>
> Larry Ducie
>
>
>