Having read everyone else's answers, I thought I would throw in my own $.02.
I have been an IBM I developer since 1992. I have been trying to learn Angular in my spare time for about 3 years now. It is hard to learn a new language in spare time with no real project to work on. Anyhow, I have some experience with both, although the angular knowledge is still limited.
I absolutely agree with the comment to avoid AngularJS. Maybe you meant Angular and not AngularJS. Anyhow, AngularJS was version 1.0. It was so bad that they totally rewrote it for version 2.0. When I first started learning it, I was using Google and had stuff that just wouldn't work. I reached out to an Angular developer and sent him my code. His response was "you are mixing AngularJS with Angular version 6 and they are not compatible". For the most part, Angular 2.0 through current (I think they are at version 19 now) has been upward compatible with a few exceptions for deprecated functions.
Given my limited knowledge of Angular, I could be wrong with this statement, but I don't see how a green screen program can be "converted" into an Angular web app without a lot of massaging and tweaking. And, based on my experience with code "converted" from one language to another, it will be close to impossible to debug it to fix problems. Chrome (and maybe others) has a decent debugging system but honestly, I have trouble debugging my own code. I can't imagine trying to debug program converted code.
Another statement that could be wrong is that unlike Java and other such languages, the only way to access data with an Angular app is via an HTTP request. The Angular app sends an HTTP request for the data and the data is returned in the response. There is no way (as I understand it) for an Angular front end to execute an SQL statement to retrieve data. I wrote a generic rpgle program to process an SQL statement sent to it via an HTTP request and it returns the data in JSON format but it is not efficient. This SQL restriction also means that it can't execute a stored procedure from an Angular app. I would assume that you could add code to your HTTP server program to do it based on some passed criteria but I have not tried to do anything like that. Anyone that knows different on this SQL issue, please correct me and add some details so I can look further into this.
-----Original Message-----
From: RPG400-L <rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Suren K
Sent: Saturday, December 28, 2024 8:47 PM
To: RPG programming on IBM i <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Tool to Modernize IBMi Screens into GUI
Hi All,
I’m looking for a tool to help modernize our IBMi application screens into a GUI. Our plan is to use AngularJS for the front end, and we need to convert all IBMi screen programs into APIs, which will be utilized for the GUI screens. The majority of the subfiles in the IBMi applications are single-page with data queue approach.
Additionally, the web services for these APIs can either be deployed on the IBMi (via IWS, HTTP Server with CGI, etc.) or on a separate Windows server (such as Java Web Services) — either approach will work for us.
If anyone has suggestions for the best tools available in the market to help convert the IBMi screen programs into APIs, I would appreciate your input.
Regards,
Suren
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