Re: Is RPG dying (Henrik R?tzou)

Henrik

Great post! Thanks for putting this in a clear perspective that an old dog
like me can understand. I never would have guessed you've been around
since the early 70's. I'm afraid it will take a better old dog than me to
be both a backend and frontend guy in the future. I doubt we will ever
again see a family of systems that will last for 40 or 50 years and be
changed by evolution rather than revolution. Now if you could just tell me
in 100 words or less how to take all those old front end programs with many
formats in each one and make them stateless in a month.

Jim


message: 1
date: Fri, 17 Feb 2012 17:36:15 +0100
from: Henrik R?tzou <hr@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: Is RPG dying

RPG is dead, long live RPG!



For us who has been in IBM midrange from the early 70? RPG has died many
times (RPG, RPGII, RPGIII etc.) just to see that its successor came out
stronger and with much new and richer functionality that its predecessor .



RPG is a server language and historical it is made to create procedural
(transaction-based) business applications and therefore it is itself
procedural and that is therefore it is a very efficient language for that
kind of applications compared with OO languages that are created to make
applications like word processors, spreadsheets, games and GUI clients.



In other words RPG has a force over any other language unless anybody think
procedural (transaction-based) business applications such as ERP will
disappear overnight or in the coming future.



The strength of RPG is apparent for us that participated in IBM?s San
Francisco java based project where an OO approach was tried in order to be
able to construct OO based and modeled common business objects (CBO?s) and
business components (BPC?s) ? the OO approach was simply to complex and San
Francisco would have resulted in a SAP equivalent in complexity.



RPG?s role in direct UI programming may disappear because the UI
development again goes towards client-centric APP?s with their own SDK?s
and program languages (typical C, java or OOjavascript) but this isn?t the
lack of OO in RPG that drives that development, it is the general typical
client and server role/paradigm that are rapidly changing in the
Multi-Channel Delivery (MCD) world.



In this new MCD world another paradigm is also under pressure and that is
the ?One programmer can do it all? paradigm ? many young programmers title
themselves as ?Frontend Programmer? thereby indicating indirectly that they
have no experience in ?Backend Programming? or in other words in neither
programming server side applications or manage them.



Last year I visited the IT University in Lund/Sweden. I was presented for a
number of UI?s that apparently talked to a server and I was of course
interested in what technology they used as backend. When I asked them ?What
server do you have as backend?? ? They answered with a counter question ?Do
you mean our mail server?? They didn?t have a server but what they did
have on their laptop was a XAMPP (a little apache environment) that was
able emulate backend and serve the expected data to their APP?s.



The funny thing is that these new guys in town even consider MS .NET as
?old fashion? technology simply because the controller and event handler
are server centric and they didn?t either had any preference of OS on the
server side, what they actually just wanted was a backend that was service
oriented and served the data in JSON! Again, technologies as XML were
considered ?old fashion? from these Frontend guy?s point of view and they
would at any time prefer a server that serves them simple JSON instead of
having to deal with a system that may offer the same data in a complex SOAP
environment ? just because it is the common technique at hand from the
?server guy?s? point of view.



Another funny thing is that IBM?s lack of adding a common GUI to IBM I,
where MS in the early server war was able to do it with proprietary MS
products like .ASP and later .NET and browser technologies like ACTIVEX and
thereby take marked shares - may backfire for MS not only because of the
new guy?s in town but because they simply didn?t see what was coming from
Google and Apple and it may to me be a plus for IBM Power servers and IBM I.



Back to RPG - RPG as C, JAVA etc., isn?t the answer to all applications,
but taken the type of server side applications RPG typically serves, it has
always been a very strong and proven resistant and useful programming
language to the present technology at any time and as long as the
integrated QSYS.LIB, DB2 and ILE environment exists, RPG will play a key
factor in that environment.



Since RPG lives in the QSYS.LIB ILE environment, RPG can in this
environment mix OO and procedural programming principles. RPG has DB2, SQL
and ILE ?build in? as an integrated principal, no other platform or
language has that!



And as long we are able to extend RPG by using the ILE environment ? nobody
has to die ;-)



The king is dead, long live the king