Re: The Truth About EGL

Nathan,

Many of the pundits that advocate extending DDS to support Web Apps should
know better. This approach has actually been very carefully evaluated by
experts from both the languges, tools, and i5/OS teams. Nathan, what you
say about extending DDS is true on the surface and would certainly provide
an easy to code approach for RPG programmers. Unfortunately it would not
scale or perform within the i5/OS architecture.

While many customers run 2000 or more 5250 user sessions, our customers have
instances during their day where you have over 100,000 users accessing your
web sites. An i5 machine running 100,000 interactive jobs would be the
System i sales person's dream.

Nathan, look at your DDS keywords and you will find that you can in fact and
have been able to embed HTML in DDS since about 1995. Also keep in mind
that DDS and RPG provides the ease of use that it does because you are
running full conversational code. You send the screen to the terminal and
your program and its supporting job waits on the user for a response and
then execute the next line of code.

As you well know, I was a Net.Data advocate for many years. It was easy and
did the job in the early days of the web with a simple CGI based approach
leveraging service programs to provide some degree of performance.
Ultimately it would not scale. CGI simply does not scale. You need the
advanced system management capabilities of an Application Server. You can
still call RPG programs that are written in such a manner so that you can
call them, and quite frankly I see this as an excellent balance leveraging
existing people and skills.

Also keep in mind that while I said RPG is far from dead, it is also on the
decline. The number of RPG programmers is rapidly diminishing as is the
case for COBOL also. Many of our customers are coming to us asking us to
help migrate away from RPG or COBOL.

Look RPG is an outstanding language and better than it has ever been at the
V5R4 level of the language and will be even better at V6R1 and beyond, but
facts are facts. It is an old language and no amount of wishing or
marketing will turn it into a popular modern language. RPG as I said before
has at least a strong 10 year life, maybe much longer. It is however on the
decline. Just look around your shop. How many young people (20's or even
30's) do you have in the shop? Who is teaching RPG? or COBOL for that
matter.