Re: IBM getting it right!

Larry Ducie wrote:

Hi Guys,

I went to the Interaction symposium at Surfers Paradise (QLD, Australia) last week and wished I'd gone to one of those gigs sooner!

The presentations the IBMers put on were just great. I sat through every Rational Development presentation they had and talked to the guys from IBM and I think we now have a great roadmap for moving our whole shop (20+ developers) over to RDi (RPG developers) and RDi-SOA for Java (RPG, java and jsp developers). We will start training them on WDSCi 7.0 while still at 5.4 to get everybody over the transition shock. :-)

I think the original launch of RDi got everybody confused (including many IBMers) but I guess it is difficult to know what to keep and what to lose when everything is bundled and shipped free. IBM were on a loser there from the start. But credit to them, they reacted quickly and got it right. It is also difficult to justify complaining about IBM's development roadmap if you haven't talked to IBM. Now I have I'm very happy with it.

Joe, you was right about RDi moving to a newer version of eclipse too. It was confirmed that the next release of RDi (out in October I believe) will be based on eclipse 3.3. So that's all great!

Anyway, just wanted to post a 'I'm happy with IBM' message, and that's not even going into the changes to RPG (possibly overloaded procedure names, and maybe ability to write/read xml on EXFMT) on the way or the excellent work they have done with the SQL SQE optimizer (that's for another list I'm sure).

Larry, I'm glad you got good news! I agree that once you listen to the message carefully, you realize that IBM has done a really good job of digging themselves out of a very tough spot. Yes, they deserve the blame for put ting themselves in that spot, but they deserve the credit for making the best of a bad situation, and more importantly, showing us a real future for the platform.

I did want to clarify a couple of things, though.

I haven't heard anything about RDi SOA for Java. Well that's not true. I was told specifically by IBM to not use that phrase. I heard that the current RDi SOA with EGL tooling will likely be re-branded as RDi SOA for EGL, and there have been rumors of an RDi SOA for Java, but the last I heard it wasn't ready for announcement.

As to the version of Eclipse used for RDi, I was under the impression that it would be Eclipse 3.4, not Eclipse 3.3. Do you have any names of IBMers stating those things or links to this information?

Joe