Re: WDSC vs. RDi

David Gibbs wrote:

Michael Ryan wrote:

Depends on how much WDSc is in RDi I suppose.

From an System i / iSeries developer perspective, the bulk of WDSC is in RDi (as far as I can see).

As far as I have been able to tell, the stuff that's been removed from RDi that was in WDSC was mostly unneeded to do host application development (web editor, etc).

BTW: This thread now belongs in the WDSCI-L list (http://lists.midrange.com/listinfo/wdsci-l) and I'm crossposting this message there.

Boy, the semantics here are really tricky. The bulk of WDSC was not System i development. Because it was built on top of RAD, it included (but was not limited to <grin>): HTML editor, JSP editor, CSS editor, JavaScript editor, web site designer, XML editor, web application test environment, and on and on.

In fact, all that was in WDSC that was System i specific was RSE and LPEX, and that really was a fraction of the package.

Now, as far as pure green screen development goes, RDi does indeed contain those piece that WDSC had. However, it's my contention that WDSC was far more than a GUI version of PDM and SEU. For a brief shining moment, WDSC was the only true multi-tier IDE out there. You could start with a simple HTML web page and build it up to a fully-featured AJAX-enabled web application using RPG business logic, and do it all inside the IDE. So from that standpoint, a whole lot of WDSC is not in RDi.

It's a matter of perspective, certainly, but it seems to me just a little bit backward to once again segregate the green screen developer from the rest of the development world. I understand the mathematics of it, but I still liked when even a long-time RPG programmer could, if they so desired, fire up a web services tutorial inside of WDSC just to see what it did.

Joe