From My Wish List

I really like the idea of an IDE. It should do all the keeping track of things for me. It should help me with my builds, it should make debugging easier for me, and RDI does a lot of that very nicely. But one place where it falls short is in helping with ILE builds. I shouldn't have to remember what modules are used to build which service programs. I shouldn't even have to manage binder source, the IDE should be able to do that for me. Maybe I am missing something, but this sort of build support should be a minimum level of support. I was talking to a colleague about ILE, and he told me that he hasn't done ILE because it is too hard. To hard in that there are too many moving parts, and no tools that know how to manage them. If I am missing something, please let me know, but I just don't see it in RDi. I was hoping that an I Project would be the ticket, but not really. It lets you write a biding program, but that is not the tool doing the work.

What would be nice is to be able to define a service program in some sort of meta data. A dialog would let me attach modules to the service program, and then tell which procedures were exported. It would also allow me to attach binding directories, and work with the binding directory entries. It would be smart enough to know whether to create or update the service program based on source dates, and whether or not I have added a new module. And I would simply have to tell RDI to build the service program, and it would do it all correctly. That includes recompiling the sources that have changed, and updating or replacing the service program. Generating the appropriate binder source with a static signature. Disallowing moving or removal of exports if at all possible, or making it painful to do so because that would require a rebind of all dependent programs and service programs. It would be nice though if RDi could handle that though as well, automatically.

Now I realize that some of you are pretty sophisticated with ILE objects, and have processes and procedures in place to handle them for you, but don't you think that this is really the job of the IDE? This isn't Notepad, or even SEU.

Mark Murphy
STAR BASE Consulting, Inc.
mmurphy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx