Re: justifying RDi when WDSCi 'still works'

Thanks for all the input, folks!

We have quotes with our corporate discounts, etc., applied for both 'trading in' ADTS seats and buying new RDi seats. The trade in price is roughly half the purchase price.

The issue comes down to ROI - we have to develop the numbers and show that they're reasonable to have a chance of getting the money (which is especially tight with business down). The application diagram is a nice feature, but hard to hang an ROI on. It would help if screen and printer designer were in GA and demonstrably better than CODE so we could hang a number on that. We haven't started using the V6R1 enhancements yet, since there are still partitions on V5R4 - maybe in a few weeks - but the cost of them not being supported in WDSCi isn't apparent yet. We don't know how much we're going to use them, especially since most developers here use SEU, which only 'tolerates', rather than 'supports', them, whatever that means. We thought we had a way in since RDi is based on Eclipse 3.4 and supports certain plug-ins that we were looking at using (PHP development, that sort of thing), but management has backed away from support of those directions also.

We may have to wait until IBM improves RDi some more.

Um, on the spool files view, I have the option of loading *SCS spool files into an editor where I can search them. I'm using Softlanding's plug-in, though, and don't remember what's in the tool's vanilla spool file support (if anything).

Dave Shaw
Mohawk Industries

----- Original Message ----- From: "Kurt Anderson" <kurt.anderson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "'Websphere Development Studio Client for iSeries'" <wdsci-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, August 21, 2009 4:01 PM
Subject: Re: [WDSCI-L] justifying RDi when WDSCi 'still works'

RDi has a neat tool to create a graphical display of how your subroutines/procedures are interconnected. The tool is still in its infancy, but I have high hopes for it.

The outline running in background is absolutely wonderful. Now if only the verify would as well (or only lock the current source).

I used the RDi 90-day trial while on v5r4. I asked a similar question a while ago (oh, probably at the start of that 90-day trial) and to be quite honest, got the same responses, and none of them really convinced management that it's time to put money down and switch.

Hopefully when we go to 6.1 there'll be more justification (in that RDi supports the 6.1 enhancements while WDSC does not).

I do suggest learning to do as much in WDSC/RDi that you normally would do in PDM. As Kelly stated, giving up your ADTS seat might get you a discount.

What I really miss is searching a compile listing - can't do that in RDi/WDSC (it's like an image or something).

-Kurt