RE: Re: New version of WDSC -- WDSCI-L

Vern,

I am not completely sure I agree with you, but that could just be because 
you didn't go into any specifics.

First of all, Java itself is very compatible.  Source developed back in 
JDK 1.0 will still compile with the latest JDK's, and even the binary 
class files themselves will still run.  If you do not use any unsupported 
language features, you can even write and compile new code today with the 
latest JDK's, and run it back on the old JVM's.  In some respects, this is 
better than the OS/400 support for RPG, since IBM artificially limits how 
far back we can target.

I think what you are really talking about are the applications themselves. 
 I do not see the changes as a problem, but a necessary evolution as the 
tools try to refine themselves and provide better capabilities.  If these 
tools were all drop-dead great to begin with I would agree with you, but 
right now I want them to evolve and get better and I am personally willing 
to bear the brunt of that if I can get a better end result.  I would hope 
that at some point the tools would get good enough that they had to start 
thinking about compatability.  But frankly, I cannot think of anything 
they have done so far that was a drastic change.  I do not consider the 
old Code/400 tools as part of the "family tree" here, so I do not count 
the move from Code/400 to WDSC as a place where IBM should have tried to 
preserve compatability.  This is especially true in light of the small 
number of people that actually used the old tools.

I am really grasping at straws here, because I am not entirely sure what 
you were trying to say, so let me just conclude by addressing the one 
comment of mine that you quoted.  What I was saying, was suppose that IBM 
tried to deliver us a fix for the Outline view crash.  I am saying that I 
would rather have seen them try to deliver a fix, and in the process 
create a new problem, as opposed to making us wait 8 months under the 
"veil" of QA.  The same QA that didn't catch the problem to begin with I 
might add.

Mark







-----Original Message-----
From: Vern Hamberg [mailto:vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2003 8:33 AM
To: Websphere Development Studio Client for iSeries
Subject: Re: [WDSCI-L] Re: New version of WDSC


This triggers what has been a growing concern for me. (This is not a shot 
at you, Mark, but a general comment on the industry.)

In the last 14 years that I've worked on AS/400, one thing considered 
crucial, and a very strong selling point, was backward compatibility. But 
I 
see the java (and maybe open source) world giving this less shrift than I 
think it should. Every release of Eclipse seems to require changes in how 
we are to work, from different arrangements of windows and menu options, 
to 
internal API calls. And the worst part of this is, we put up with this.

All the deprecated stuff in java will eventually not work at all. OTOH, 
the 
400 can probably compile an RPG I source member - I know it'll do an RPG 
II 
program.

JMHO

Vern

At 08:26 PM 8/6/2003 -0400, you wrote:
-snip-

>I think that most of us wouldn't
>mind the occasional "screw-up" slipping through if it meant quicker turn
>around on some of these problems.

-snip-


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