Re: WDSC 6, Subclipse and iSeries projects

Buck skrev den 06-07-2007 14:57:

Thanks Thorbjørn! I already found http://www.rpgunit.org/ which is sort of like JUnit, but more for RPG. I have been spending a lot of time on various XP and Scrum mailing lists so I'm familiar with TDD.

I have considered what it is that XP and Scrum do that is fundamentally different, and I believe that it is essentially that the developers are enforced to be social instead of doing individual development. Social with each other, social with the customers, etc etc etc. This allows knowledge to be distributed more than when you have a single key developer with everything in his head.

I just told you what works well for me - pair programming doesn't, we are not enough to warrant continuous integration... yet :D

I don't know if a discussion of TDD with RPG is on topic for this list exactly, but I will say that TDD has much more merit in greenfield (brand new) development. When one has a monolithic application of the 'load, sort, print' paradigm, it is very difficult to isolate code to do TDD because one database input record will fire many separate pieces of the monolith.

You are right there. The problem is that if you have such a scenario you must include a testing environment instead of just the pieces you test. This is harder to do, but makes you much more confident when you HAVE built it as it allows you to do even drastic changes and see afterwards if stuff still works.

Perhaps if WDSC had a refactoring tool that could operate on RPG, we might see more TDD in the RPG community. SOmething to think about working on in my not so copious spare time :-)

The reason why Eclipse does so well with refactoring (haven't tried IntelliJ but it should be better) is that the frameworks UNDERSTANDS that you write in Java instead of just working with plain text files. This requires a built-in compiler which can provide information to the IDE so that it knows where i.e. a variable definition starts and ends.

In order to get a similar support in any other language you must have a compiler of that language available to Eclipse, and I don't believe that the RPG compiler is written in Java :)

It is a pity that the platform specific plugins for AS/400 (and the mainframes etc) are not open source - not the whole Rational package - just the platform bits, similar to JTOpen (which even only is a subset as the native optimizations are not here), as they are basically useless without the compiler suite on the AS/400 so payment must be done anyway. This would also remove WSDCi from the marketing cloud which basically means that nobody outside our little niche have even HEARD about the platform.

But I digress :)

I wish you well and hope that it works for you.