Re: EGL vs. Java

johnking@xxxxxxx wrote:

Aaron,

RBDE (Rational Business Developer Extension) is the Rational 'plug-in'
that contains the EGL tools. This is in addition to whatever the IDE will
end up costing.

John, there is no RBDe anymore. At least not as far as System i developers go (although now I have to admit I'm not sure how it works with RAD, the non-System i Rational Application Developer). Anyway, there will be RDi which will be priced roughly equivalently with ADTS, the green-screen tools, on a per-seat basis. So basically, they've unbundled SEU/PDM/SDA and then given you an option on whether you want green screen or GUI tools. Your choice. I suspect that they may even price ADTS a bit higher, as an incentive to get you to RDi.

But base RDi has NO web application development tools. Enough System i customers have convinced IBM that there is a significant base of System i users that have no interest in and will never move to web development. And so, in order to keep a sort of parity, IBM now has in effect created a GUI development suite for green screen developers. I don't get it, but that's what the new announcement gives you. The good news is that this suite is comparably priced to the old suite, especially if you have few developers and don't need OPM compilers.

However, web development costs extra. I don't know if it's going to be $1000 a seat or $2000 a seat. It could even be more, or less, but my guess is somewhere in between (although that could just be wishful thinking on my part). Anyway, for that, you get RDi-SOA, which includes all the web development tools you saw in WDSC such as WDHT. More importantly, it will include the EGL tooling as part of the package.

Hope that helps clear things up a bit.

Joe