Re: Ruby On Rails on the iSeries

I think you're totally off the beam on this, Aaron.  EGL is nothing like
Net.data.  It's a full-fledged 4GL with a drag-n-drop JSF designer.  It
makes building web applications as easy as building VB programs, except that
the database integration is WAY better.  You define an array of customers,
drop the array on your JSF page to paint a table, and then in the page's
load routine you put "get customers" and it automatically generates ALL the
code to access the database, load a bean, and display it on the page.

It's not the silver bullet: no round trip generation, and it's not entirely
amenable to RPG business logic, but it IS very easy to extend with Java
functions and more importantly IBM is really trying to make it better.

I just gave a seminar and EGL was part of it: I can create an entire CRUD
application in about five minutes.  The jury's still out on some parts of
it, but I'm working very closely with the EGL team to present my
requirements (which exactly mirror Brian's take on the situation: you can
use EGL to VERY quickly develop thin front ends that then use RPG as the
business logic).

Finally, everything that it generates is Java, so even if IBM decides to
stop going that way, you still have the generated Java code and the working
JSF pages, so you won't be entirely abandoned.

Joe

From: albartell

I took a class in it at iSeries DevCon two years ago.  IMO, EGL is the
next
Net.Data and will most likely die the same death.  How many of you
Net.Data
people that are vested are appreciating IBM's decision to drop it?

From: Brian

Natthan, et al

Have you looked at IBM's EGL that is included in the WDSCi product? I have
only began working through the EGL tutorial but since you mentioned
WebSmart
I thought this might be an alternative. As it is, EGL will generate Java
or
Cobol code to implement the full application but what got me interested is
that it appears you can use EGL for developing the view and the controller
and hook it to RPG on the backend via the JT400 toolbox for implementing
the
model. IBM held an EGL user's conference recently that had a session on
EGL
and RPG but I wasn't able to attend and have not been able to find the
handouts from the session.

If anyone has worked with EGL and has opinions as to its viability for
developing web apps on the iSeries I would like to hear them.

Kind regards,

Brian