Impressions of EGL - Part Duex

I am going to follow up my post from earlier in the week about EGL. I just finished up my first week of training and my initial impressions are holding up. This is a solid tool for developing web applications. EGL *isn't* doing anything I couldn't do on my own. There hasn't been one of those: "Wow. I didn't know I could do that" kind of revelations. Whether it is web page design or calling Java, RPG or even accessing server resources through remote calls, none of this stuff is new. I could do all of it on my own with the existing tools I use. But, I am evaluating the switch to using EGL for my future web development. Here is why:

1. Integration. Just about everything comes with the tool out of the box. This is what I like about MyEclipse. I am using RDB right now but when I need to write programs or services in RPG I can jump to RDi without too much angst.

2. Great web services integration. They really couldn't have made accessing web services any easier. One of the tutorials has you call a web service from a web page that returns a list of theaters and movies and times using a zip code and a "radius" parameter. It took, maybe, 10 minutes to build it (less if I had known what I was doing). After running that, I added a Google map interface from another web service in about 5 minutes. Yeah, pretty "easy" to do, but will it hold up as I scale to something bigger? I can't say for sure but I'll find out more as I apply EGL to a couple of projects I am working on. The beauty of this approach is that if you expose stuff as a web service, it is a trivial task to integrate that service into your web app.

3. Remote calls to RPG. Almost as easy as the web services integration. I need to dive a bit deeper here but so far using EGL to call RPG programs and return data is a snap.

Still too soon to tell whether EGL will be my primary tool for developing web applications. Even with a week's worth of exposure to the tool, I feel like I have hardly scratched the surface. What is needed is a EGL "Cookbook" that presents common web application development issues and presents solutions. Perhaps if EGL gains some traction, we can post stuff into the wiki.

Taking the EGL tour has, so far, been helpful. I might just use EGL in the interim as a web services integration tool and then slowly move my applications to use the UI tools later. I'll learn more about that in a couple of weeks when I finish the course.

So far, I like what I see. Perhaps not with the passion that Joe Pluta has, but if you develop web apps, RPG based or not, EGL is worth more than a cursory look.

Pete Helgren