I think you know better than that, Aaron. RPG is very well suited for
building components and frameworks, but the tendency of the RPG community is
to WAIT for IBM to build an OPCODE for rendering display files as HTML.
Thanks for the gentle correction. I do know better than to state that the
way I did. I should have more appropriately said that languages like Java
are _better_ suited for frameworks because of their OO-ness and "object
discovery" capabilities (thinking of things like annotations, instanceof,
etc).
I think I just need to reformulate that into RPG speak and see how I could
retain state of RPG "objects" (say instances of named data) across requests
and for passing data between processes. I have some ideas on this front
already through pre-existing native OS/400 objects/concepts.
Sounds interesting. And if the "smart client" were a browser, then this
would be the right forum for it.
That would be a next step as the middle layer is non-verbose XML so it could
theoretically be attached to anything (i.e. thin JSP layer). I believe
Visual Studio and .NET already do this to some extent where you can simply
turn on/off a switch and take a web app and turn it into a desktop app and
vice versa.
I am looking for a customer that wants to do a beta for something like this
in the fall. Basically I need to find somebody wanting GUI desktop
applications who don't want to adopt .NET and want all MVC coding to be done
in RPG. On last note, I would love to make something like this open source
so it could be more widely adopted and enhanced by members of the community.
Of course if I did it on my employers time I would have to get their
permission, but even then there could be a free/opensource standard version
and then a supported enterprise version... Anyways, I am rambling now :-)
Thanks for your comments Nathan,
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [
mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Nathan Andelin
Sent: Friday, June 01, 2007 10:48 AM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Recommendations of web
developmentarchitecture/toolfordiverse i5 access...
Aaron B wrote:
Have you built any RPG CGI frameworks that go beyond tools
likeCGIDEV2 and abstract the programming to a higher level?
Yes, I built an ILE framework, and many of the procedures are similar to
those in CGIDEV2. But unlike the CGI interface, instances of my Web
applications are launched (or stopped) by evoking a command from the command
line, or through a portal interface, which is quite a different paradigm.
Regarding your question about abstracting programming to a higher level, I
take it that your frame of reference is Microsoft's UI component library, or
comparable ones offered under the Java JSF specification. If so, my answer
is no.
My primary focus at the moment is building applications for the K-12
education market.
I recognize that RPG isn't well suited to frameworks as Java or PHP
would be, but there are definitely things that could be done in that
vein to make it easier to program web apps from RPG.
I think you know better than that, Aaron. RPG is very well suited for
building components and frameworks, but the tendency of the RPG community is
to WAIT for IBM to build an OPCODE for rendering display files as HTML.
GUI desktop applications in RPG where 100% of the programming is done
in RPG and there is simply a thin "smart client" on the desktop that
renders whatever is sent to it.
Sounds interesting. And if the "smart client" were a browser, then this
would be the right forum for it.
Nathan.
midrange.com
