Re: IBM i 7.6 Development tools

Am 17.04.2025 um 21:17 schrieb Justin Taylor <jtaylor.0ab@xxxxxxxxx>:

True, although in 2025 any job where 5250 is the right tool is a job you
probably shouldn't be doing (e.g. heads-down data entry).

I wouldn't say that - even as we have a whole team for GUI and Web development, I'm right now developing a completely new solution which is 95% green screen 5250. And that solution has nothing to do with data entry.

The decision was made, because Web interfaces didn't provide a) a fast enough response time and b) a secure transactional workflow without a lot of overhead.

Last but not least - 2 prototypes were developed - one with a Web UI and one with a 5250 UI - the 5250 prototype was ready after 2 weeks - but the Web prototype wasn't even at the point, where you could show anything. So the development time for the Web UI was estimated about 3 times longer than for the 5250 UI.

Of course we do write business logic encapsulated in service programs and batch modules. The 5250 UI is completely 132x27 and quite nice - but not so important, as most of the work is automated, and the users only do some form of "exception handling" - whenever the automatic process cannot perform all steps, the user has to look into and make some adjustments. So for this purpose the 5250 UI is quite sufficient.

So from my point of view - the type of UI is overrated. Our job is to make every process as automatic as possible - and for the rest, the type of user experience mostly doesn't matter.

Just my opinion and my 2ct.

Regards,
Daniel