Re: EGL vs. Java

Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen wrote:

Joe Pluta skrev den 31-01-2008 20:44:

EGL, however, is not System i-centric. It is mean to be used by everyone to code everything. It's a PIM, platform independent model, which means that as new technologies come along, they can just tweak things here and there to take advantage of the new technology without disrupting your development.

Sounds great, but they still need to prove it to us :)

Um... just wait until 7.1 comes out (end of the quarter). You will be blown away by the next tooling they've put in place. And that's the beauty of a data-centric 4GL; it all just works together. Personally, I'm more excited about programming than I have been for a while.

In the mean time I have started looking at JRuby with the explicit goal of getting Rails running on System i, and it appears that their generated bytecode is not compatible with the System i classic JVM. This is what I will suggest to our boss that we look at for doing rapid web prototyping when it runs well.

Yeah, okay. JRuby is fine. Rails is fine. But they're frameworks, not languages, and you'll find that frameworks stink as soon as you get outside the comfort zone. 4GLs, on the other hand, especially languages with embedded high-performance hooks to 3GLs, allow you to use the 4GL to do what it's good at and easily integrate the 3GLs when you need things "outside the box".

I know I sound like I'm preaching, but you really, really have to try this stuff to believe it.

Joe