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That would mean that tools like Lansa, Magic and WinDev
would be given a prime consideration. RPG would be a fill-in.
I think a lot of developers imagine that they should be able to license an IDE for something like $359, which generates Windows interfaces, makes them 10 times more productive than the average programmer, and makes it economically feasible to create broadly-scoped highly-customized business systems for a relatively small user base. Actually, there is historical precedent for that line of thinking, but I'm not sure that it fits with this decade's business, technology, and economic models.
For instance, more and more systems that once were highly customized have become more or less stabilized. More people have figured out how to customize business processes via soft-code rather than hard-code. Now more organizations are turning to cloud services that offer greater economies of scale. Sales Force is a good example.
Regarding Windows interfaces, I recently became aware of a number of systems deployed by government agencies in Utah that were written as Windows executables. They were probably deployed as desktop executables originally, but have since been migrated to servers running Citrix.
Citrix partitions a Windows server into a number of virtual machine environments; one environment for each user, and uses pixel streaming to desktop clients so that the client sees the screen that is actually running on the server.
A key reason for using Citrix is for security purposes. More specifically, ODBC interfaces on desktop clients are really powerful one one hand, and very difficult to control on the other. So the State of Utah uses Citrix to centrally control access for all clients. It's also easier to deploy executable to servers than individual desktops.
A Citrix server configuration will cost about $20K for a setup that supports about 20 concurrent users. And that doesn't include the cost of a database server if your applications use a remote database. Compare that to one of our clients that supports more than 3,000 concurrent clients on a 4-core IBM i server. The point is that you gain very significant economies of scale by running native interfaces under IBM i. At the same time, you get server-side control (better security) and application deployment advantages.
Does anyone else besides me see the economies of scale by using RPG in conjunction with native IBM i workload management?
-Nathan
midrange.com
