I think we will know a lot more in 3 to 5 years. In that time IBM will have
gotten around to deciding how much they will charge for this product, and
hopefully stick to it for more than 6 months. We will also have testament
in numbers of whether or not EGL can step to the mark of mission critical
applications, afterall, why adopt such an infrastructure change unless it
truly can replace reliance on RPG (if that hang-up exists in your shop). Or
will IBM drop it for the next "better idea"? Seems like IBM/Rational is
REALLy struggling with firm longterm direction in the "extending the
iSeries" front over the past 10 years. Where will they settle? I am
guessing the variety of personalities in a growing team is what's caused the
success and failure of past approaches.
The cool thing is that they are still advancing RPG even though it hasn't
been popular for quite some time. I am surprised the large IBM RPG
customers haven't pushed IBM for more advancement to RPG so they don't have
to adopt a modfied software stack (i.e. Net.Data, Java, EGL, VARPG, etc).
Should be an interesting landscape in the near future.
BTW, while I watch the Packers this afternoon I am going to be checking out
EGL with my trial download of RAD 7.0. Looking forward to seeing if it can
deliver all the great things I have heard about it over the past 6 months.
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of tim
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2007 11:37 AM
To: 'Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries'
Subject: Re: [WEB400] EGL FUD - was: JSF/EGL datatable positioning question
Trevor,
I've worked with RPG forever. Continue to work with it today. I've created
web sites with CGIDEV. EGL, though a code generator, does offer some nice
features in creating web application. I've been impresses with what it has
to offer. I still use RPG for most of my back-end processes.
I'm not sure about replacing RPG, or if EGL is the best way to go in
creating web interfaces for existing RPG applications, but it is nice.
Tim
-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Trevor Perry
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2007 11:14 AM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] EGL FUD - was: JSF/EGL datatable positioning question
Bob,
Is it important not to confuse EGL with JSF because EGL is a Java and/or
COBOL generator, and not an actual programming language?
And if COBOL or Java are my choices of what EGL generates, why would I spend
any money replacing all my RPG applications with this kind of tool? Why
would I not continue to use RPG? There are many tools to get me to the web
with RPG that require much less investment than a new language-generator, so
I am confused as to why certain IBM employees, such as yourself, continue to
push the EGL religion, while most i5/OS IBMers tell us RPG has a strong
future.
We keep hearing of your suggestion that EGL should replace RPG. This
concerns most members of the community, excepting a few who have drunk the
koolaid. If customers feel that their only modernization path is to replace
everything with a language that simply generates other languages (COBOL
being one), we are all going out to buy LANSA or BCD tomorrow, since those
are cheaper and more productive paths to our future.
Modernization has rarely been a "throw everything out and replace with xxx",
yet it seems like the EGL proponents at Rational would like us to do this.
Can you stop this FUD, or explain why you wish the midrange community to
spend huge dollars on replacing everything with this generator tool with no
apparent business ROI? I understand this would help IBM revenue, but it does
not make financial sense in any way to System i customers.
Trevor
On 12/16/07 10:29 AM, "Bob Cancilla" <bob.cancilla@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Folks,
You may want to post this and other technical questions about EGL to:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=435. This is
the IBM DeveloperWorks forum for EGL. It is monitored by the development
staff and other expert EGL users who usually respond within 24 to 48
hours.
This forum is dedicated to answering "how to" questions.
BTW, Joe is correct in his statements, understanding how Java and JSF
handles the solution is not necessarily the best way to handle issues in
EGL. The whole point of EGL is to hide the underlying technology so you
don't have to deal with it. This will become even more of an issue as we
roll out our next version of EGL with WEB 2.0 support where we provide
advanced UI capabilities that leverage Silverlight, DoJo, in addition to
AJAX and advanced JavaScript. All of the supporting JavaScript, JSF,
XAML,
and other technology code is hidden and generated by EGL. We have been
doing webcasts and demos of this new facility which will be announced and
shipped in 2008.
I've asked our experts to look at this specific question and will respond
here when I get an answer. The most direct path to EGL Q&A is the
DeveloperWorks forum.
midrange.com
