Re: Webfacing out, EGL in

David Gibbs wrote:

Joe Pluta wrote:

What cost? Compared to what? Green screen development?

The cost of the tool.

Well, that and the fact that I would be tied to the tool.

That's not cost. It's make vs. buy, and the make vs. buy issue is an awfully rough one for most companies to bet the farm on these days.

IMO, the best way to develop a web enabled interface to an i application
would be: Hand code the RPG service programs, hand code the Java that
talks to the service programs, and hand code the JSP that drives the
user interface.

At most I would use tools that are open source and community supported
(like Eclipse) for the java components.

This way I'm not tied to any third party tool for development & debugging.

A lot of work? Yes, absolutely. But I can count on everything, back to
front because I understand it completely. Every component, action,
request, response, & result are there because of conscious decisions I made.

As I've mentioned in the past, I'm not a big fan of code generators (for
reasons I won't repeat here).

I understand your position. I've always been a make guy vs. a buy guy - you know that. At the same time, there are very few companies that can afford the resources you're suggesting. From a cost standpoint, what you are suggesting is much *more* expensive (in time, resources, development, debugging) than the EGL approach.

PHP is a whole new set of software to learn, install and eventually pay for (remember, PHP is *not* free, it's only free "for now").

Huh? I was under the impression that PHP _is_ free ... especially
considering it's open source.

Anyways, EGL is as much a new language as PHP is. PHP has the advantage
of being much more widely accepted than EGL.

Zend PHP for i not free. The Zend Platform is actually quite expensive, and as I understand it even the Zend Core is a for-fee product; IBM is just shipping with the first three years of maintenance waived, but after that it costs. If you do PHP on some other platform, then you can get PHP for free, but now we're talking the costs of additional platforms.

Even green screen is not free. Try maintaining Client Access installations in Japan - I have a client who can tell you about those
nightmares firsthand. And of course, no GUI.

Heh, I'm in the process of learning just that :)

My point is simply that, of the available options, EGL is fast becoming the cheapest choice.

Joe