RE: Aurora -- SYSTEM21

The following is being posted to provide additional clarification of the 
RPG/ILE conversion process.  It is an extraction from a System21 Aurora Q&A 
document that will be available on AnswerLink in its entirety in the near 
future.

Regards,

Michelle Hobbs
Geac Enterprise Solutions


        We have become aware of some concerns being expressed regarding the 
complexity of the conversion of RPG/400 to RPG/ILE in System21 Aurora. This 
concern particularly relates to the impact on customizations or custom code, 
and a resulting increase in the cost of upgrade to our customers. We believe 
these concerns are unfounded for a number of reasons:

        1. Customers do not have to convert their custom code to RPG/ILE.
         
        OPM programs may call ILE and vice versa.  So if they have custom 
programs which call standard or vice versa then they do not have to convert the 
custom programs to ILE even if the standard ones have been converted.  
          
        2. Having said this, we recommend that they do convert so that they can 
share in the undoubted benefits of RPG/ILE.

        The benefits which we have discovered are: 

                - it is more up-to-date than RPG/400.  

                - the resulting source code is clearer, easier to read, and 
therefore easier to support.

                - it provides the benefit of a modular approach. Such an 
approach allows reuse of modules, intensive testing of modules allowing greater 
resilience, and the ability to change modules without disruption to other parts 
of the system. Of course if customers convert to RPG/ILE they can develop their 
own modules AND use the ones delivered with the product.

                - with RPG/ILE we can make use of activation groups. These 
provide greater control of job characteristics for particular applications 
within a job. This has particular advantages for custom applications operating 
within a standard job.

                - better Java integration. This integration is much improved 
with the use of RPG/ILE at V5R1. This is increasingly important as the core ERP 
system is extended to the web and other systems. This is as true of custom 
function as it is of standard. 

        3. Its easy. 

        We used a standard IBM conversion command to convert our source from 
RPG/400 to RPG/ILE. This converted our source and all we then needed to do was 
to recompile the code. For all our applications, consisting of millions of 
lines of code, this took no more than a few days.

        4. The resulting code is easy for any RPG/400 programmer to understand 

        All our programmers prefer RPG/ILE to RPG/400. RPG/ILE has been around 
for a long time, and if you recruit an RPG programmer he is likely to be more 
familiar with RPG/ILE than RPG/400.    

        5. Our reviews of  early adopter projects suggest that System21 Aurora 
uplifts of custom code are no more costly than previous uplifts.

        6. We must remember that System21 Aurora extends the function of the 
product over previous releases, both in terms of the function delivered, and 
also the capability to configure solutions provided by process.connect. We 
expect this to reduce the amount of customizations that customers require after 
the upgrade.  Even if the custom work continues, the extra productivity of 
RPG/ILE should quickly repay any costs incurred as a result of its introduction.