Re: Webfacing out, EGL in

Thanks again, Aaron, for taking the time to respond. I know you are busy....

"The View layer wouldn't need to be in RPG at all, and RPG probably isn't the
best suited to write that layer (though it could). I have been toying with
the idea of taking a weekend to see if GWT (Google Web Toolkit) could work
as the View and RPG would pass a meta data definition of a field to the GWT
and it would instantiate the appropriate object and send it to the screen."

Yeah, I think solving the "view" part of the equation is the important piece here. Easy enough for a motivated programmer (even an old RPG codger like me) to learn. I think EGL fills the bill here but that is just me. I can't remember if you have kicked the tires on EGL yet, but you should and give it a go for a couple of weeks. I wouldn't recommend a two week stint for someone who is new to web programming but you you know all the stuff that is in EGL so what you would really be evaluating is the packaging of the tools for easy of use and and your ability to break out of the box when you wanted to do something more bleeding edge. I am just amazed at how deep and well integrated it is. I have been doing way more non-EGL stuff this summer than I want and I am chomping at the bit to get back to EGL. I feel like I really haven;t even hardly excercised it yet.

GWT is cool. I am blown away by what those folks produce (so far, for free!). I spend quite a bit of time at the Google "technology buffet" because there is plenty to sample. If I ever win the lottery all I want to do is play with stuff that is out there on the web. An amazing array of things.

Pete



Aaron Bartell wrote:

So your "issue" with IBM is that the technology that interfaces your HTML

pages and your business logic isn't RPG centric enough ?

Actually, I wouldn't necessarily care if EGL was used for the View layer as
long as each new development didn't require EGL programming (if that makes
sense). This would basically make EGL a compiled framework component and at
that point I would have written it in Java to save the maintenance of that
framework component being written in a 4GL language. I guess it boils down
to me wanting a single language for the Controller and Model layers, or
maybe better stated, I *shouldn't* have to do much more on the View layer
outside of configuring it (i.e. x/y coordinates of fields, field names,
button actions, etc).

I am a pragmatist. If it is simple and it works and allows me to deliver

solutions that are stable and attractive (well, maybe I have a ways to go on
the "attractiveness" part but it ain't the tool's fault), if those goals are
met then I am good to go.

That is what I desire also, but it needs to be meshed with longterm
direction. Just take a look at the languages and frameworks you have used
over the years. What if a guy was to adopt each one as he thought it had an
edge over the last? All the sudden you have PHP, .NET, Struts, EGL, RoR in
your shop, and even within those you can vary greatly (i.e. in PHP there are
a lot of different frameworks). How do you manage that environment? How do
you find and hire people that have at least two of those knowledge sets?
How do you stay on top of those knowledge sets (think sending people to
trade shows and buying books - that's a lot). The crazy thing is that
having all of those languages in a single shot is not that far fetched. In
an article coming out in COMMON Connect I wrote about this. Needless to say
it is an opinion piece :-)

Could you take an existing 5250 application and add a few VA RPG op codes

to read and write to "windows"
instead of screen formats and that is all you had to do to port a 5250 app
to Windows?

Yep, just create a *SRVPGM that knows how to act as the inbetween concerning
the client and server. The client would know how to render a
button/field/drop-down/etc based on meta information passed down from the
server.

It also seems to me that regardless of how seamless the layers are, you are

still going to end up with an EGL-ish mix. It may not be a meta language
like EGL but even if it was DDS and RPG, that would still be a "meta" layer
before the HTML, CSS and Javascript was rendered.

Agreed. Insulation for change more or less.

I guess my question is: Would you expect this seamless View layer to be

written in RPG and DDS (or whatever i centric languages exist)?

The View layer wouldn't need to be in RPG at all, and RPG probably isn't the
best suited to write that layer (though it could). I have been toying with
the idea of taking a weekend to see if GWT (Google Web Toolkit) could work
as the View and RPG would pass a meta data definition of a field to the GWT
and it would instantiate the appropriate object and send it to the screen.
Then when the user clicked a button it would invoke the appropriate GWT
servlet and that servlet would route it to the appropriate RPG program
(based on meta data).

Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com