Aaron Bartell wrote:
How can we as IBM i professionals make decisions for our organization's
longterm success when IBM is continually stabilizing their different
modernization strategies, and thus only allowing for short-term success?
I'm only going to do this once, because the tone of this conversation is
already way too far in the negative, but it still needs at least one
response.
Webfacing was never a modernization strategy. IBM has always pointed
you towards application re-engineering, primarily through rewriting to
Java. That's IBM's strategy, always has been. However, we in the
midrange industry have resisted that for years, primarily because RPG is
a better language than Java for business development.
But because green screen is simply unacceptable in the end user
community - and really, has been since the late 1980's, the heyday of
the screen scrapers - we've had a strained relationship with the users.
Once the one hand, we have powerful applications with subsecond response
time, on the other hand our screens are ugly even though we try to gussy
them up with fancy DDS keywords and other "lipstick on the pig" approaches.
There has been a distinct and consistent voice in the industry to
decouple business logic and presentation. This has been going on for at
least 20 years now, and has been largely unheeded by the community.
Instead, they've used the various quick fixes - screen scraping,
webfacing - to prolong the life of their applications. The business
reasons have usually been the same - why fix what's not broken, what is
the bottom line, screen scraping is "good enough". Couple that with
some whizbang demos and a few well placed whispers, and any attempt at
true modernization falls by the wayside.
Was IBM wrong to provide them with tools to do this? I don't know. But
I don't know of anybody who has ever credibly pitched HATS or WebFacing
as a strategic modernization approach. Yes, there might be some people
who try, but some people pitch moving to Windows as a modernization
approach. At that point, it's all about the benjamins.
Anyway, to get to my point: the modernization approach has ALWAYS been
to move to Java. The biggest pushback against that outside our
community is the complexity of getting even simple things done in Java,
and that's what EGL does: it removes the complexities of the plumbing
and the OO and gets you right into programming. And the pushbakc within
our community is that nothing outperforms RPG, but EGL works there too,
in that it provides a multi-tiered approach allowing you to use the best
tools for each later: Java for presentation, RPG for business logic.
You, Aaron, personally rebel against the multi-language approach, so
this may not appeal to you. Luckily, my clients don't agree with you;
most of them realize that the days of a single language are just as gone
as the days of the 5250. The future is multi-lingual, multi-tiered,
multi-interface, multi-platform, and the fastest way to get there is EGL.
Joe
midrange.com
