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

A lot of what you describe is what I am planning (i.e. build RPG sub procs
that perform GUI functionality through easy parm passing vs. having to
laboriously compose UI components).

Any plans to go open source with your framework?

This is what I am shooting for. I think the community needs this and I
think it can be open source and still have a profit made from it through
support/implementations/advanced versions.

More RPG open source solutions would encourage more folks to stick with or

initially consider System i.

Agreed. The only problem is getting funding for such a product which is why
I put out the carrot for anybody wanting to pay professional services hours
to have something like this built for their companies purposes. I mentioned
it to one gent at COMMON who works for a casino to see if they would be
willing to charter such an endeavor and keep it open source, and he
responded that with casino's they are so competitive they wouldn't want to
share the end result (I can see his point which might also be the feelings
of other companies).

It's one of those things that I could probably have a solid prototype in
place within 100 hours, but that means somebody has to be ready to fork over
$10K to $15K or my employer has to let me "play" for that many hours just to
give it away in the end (hard sell).

Anyways, I have it on my list of things to do, I just wish I could get it
out before year end because it feels like we are getting a lot of forum
postings (monthly or almost weekly) concerning .NET or Java taking over
iSeries development simply because RPG wasn't GUI.

Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com

-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Pete Helgren
Sent: Friday, June 01, 2007 12:38 PM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] 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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