Re: Recommendations of web developmentarchitecture/toolfor diverse i5 access...

I am working on a concept/prototype right now that is a little off topic in
the web400 list, but it involves writing 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. I have
already developed the code on another client side platform with a
Apache/Perl serverside and now I just need to change the server side (which
is trivial).

>>

I company I started and still have some ownership in (the same one that Nathan does some development work for and resells his product through) has a manager who was with a company called "Vultus" which was bought by SCO in 2003 (How is that for "three degrees of separation"?...) They had a product called Webface Solution Suite (originally WebTop, I think) that used XML, Javascript and HTML to provide some rich client side controls for web applications. It required an Active X plugin for the client but the actual look and feel was pretty Windows-like. Since it was all basically text, the only challenge was the initial load of the control. I am not sure what you are developing: Sending 5250 data to the "smart client" or sending text to the client, but something similar makes sense. You could have "heavier" controls that the client renders based on the data it receives from the server. How RPG would uniquely play in that environment, I don't know. I suppose just having familiar RPG opcodes and coding methodologies would be helpful enough to most RPG programmers but rendering to a GUI environment will always add a dimension, I think, that will be a learning curve for most RPG programmers. The more MVC the framework ends up being, the better off (I think) RPG programmers will be since business logic, not graphic design, is the forte of most programmers. Allowing a graphics person to design the user presentation and easing the integration of the UI with the backend leads to a successful framework. It is one of the reasons I have stuck with Freemarker for my java servlet development: I can have a web graphics designer do the all the heavy lifting to build the UI and I can concentrate on the business logic and DB I/O.

Any plans to go open source with your framework? More RPG open source solutions would encourage more folks to stick with or initially consider System i.

Pete Helgren


albartell wrote:

Nathan, you have done a lot in the RPG CGI space (from everything I have
gathered on these forums). Have you built any RPG CGI frameworks that go
beyond tools like CGIDEV2 and abstract the programming to a higher level? 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 am working on a concept/prototype right now that is a little off topic in
the web400 list, but it involves writing 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. I have
already developed the code on another client side platform with a
Apache/Perl serverside and now I just need to change the server side (which
is trivial).

That's one thing that I haven't seen a lot of in the RPG space - frameworks
for application development. Sure there is a lot of modular code out there,
but that is a far cry from frameworks. Like has already been stated,
frameworks can get in the way, but they can also make you incredibly
efficient (you could think of native DB access in RPG as our DB access
framework - works for 90% of what we need).

Back to my hole,
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com


-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Nathan Andelin
Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2007 9:33 PM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Recommendations of web developmentarchitecture/toolfor
diverse i5 access...

Steve R wrote:
what asp.net offers are user written server controls ...

UI components are a hallmark of the Microsoft mind-set. Just drag and drop
pre-built UI widgets from the palette onto a form, set their properties,
including references to database record-sets and fields, attach code to
pre-defined event handlers. That model worked so well at attracting
entry-level programmers to Visual Basic, then why not apply it to the
browser paradigm?

It's really hard for me to argue against UI component technology when it's
the foundation of Microsoft technology and now highly touted by the J2EE
community, but I found it to be too constraining for me as a Visual Basic
developer, and when Microsoft adapted their UI widgets to render as HTML,
the constraints became even greater. They're great at attracting developers
to Microsoft's tools, on the other hand.

Nathan.






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