Re: Impressions of EGL - Part Deux

Joe,

I really like the web services side, as I said. It is a great way for IBM to not only promote SOA but to make it happen, effortlessly. Very cool. Very efficient. Just seeing it in action changed the way I started viewing solutions.

RUI is something that intrigues me. Very similar to what I saw in the last version of HATS I worked with. The options for HTML/RUI and TUI is really quite remarkable. Again, I'll have more to talk about once I have a chance to use the tools more extensively during the second part of the Webinar the week of June 2nd.

Yeah, I could do all that stuff myself but it is a total PITB(utt). I guess I wasn't clear in saying that I saw that the advantage of EGL is that it makes implementing all this stuff easier. I don't use JSP or JSF technology in my mainline Java webapp development currently so I really can't weigh in on the drag/drop/bind issues. EGL made this all SO easy that I am feeling like a caveman with a hammer and chisel as I go back to a couple of applications I am currently working on. My point is: You can do this stuff, but EGL makes it so easy to do it that it is almost criminal to be doing it the "old" way.
I have both RDB and RDi installed, although I have two workspaces I use to keep things less cluttered. I could easily jump between EGL and RPG within the RDx framework if I had all the stuff in the same workspace though.

Jon Sayles has been a great instructor this week. He had expected 100 in the class and it turns out that only about 40 of us showed up (common with Webinars I hear). In any case, the format of having an hour of instruction and then intense, comprehensive tutorials (homework) , for a couple of hours and then another 1 hour of instruction, followed by tutorials (homework) works well. He is knowledgeable about all the of the languages and technologies used and even today, as we learned about calling RPG from EGL, he had a clear understanding of the issues and presented solid solutions. He has also been quick to get information to and from the other folks in the EGL team (Clauss Weiss for one) so the learning has been relevant and applicable.

I am viewing this from a Java developer perspective which is a little different than you. You write your business logic in RPG because your solutions are planned to be deployed on i. I write most of my stuff in Java, even the business logic, because I have two applications that run on three platforms and I am trying to minimize the platform specific implementations as much as possible. There is only one of me and I need to leverage these particular small applications into as many possible platforms as I can for economic reasons.

But, don't get me wrong: EGL looks to be as strong a solution when leveraging RPG components as Java (or Cobol). I need a more efficient way to develop my web applications, regardless of language. EGL just might be the ticket, but I have more to learn.

Pete


Joe Pluta wrote:

Pete Helgren wrote:

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.

Pete, have you tried creating a web service with EGL? That's definitely something that ought to make a light go on. Using EGL to expose RPG business logic as web services, and then testing those services with the built-in Web Services Explorer, is quite productive.

Then when you decide to do your UI research, you have to look at the Rich Web Services technology. That's what we used for the RSDC scheduler. That's what will take your applications to a level that is pretty much at the very cutting edge of today's web technologies.

I do find it interesting though that you note there's nothing there you couldn't do yourself. Have you tried dropping a field or a record or an array of records onto a web page? The fact that the data from the EGL fields is automatically passed to the page with no work on your part, that's what I find lacking in any tagging approach, be it JSP or CGI. In the other techniques, you have to specify the linkage; with the JSF tooling in EGL it's automatic. I've done JSP for years, and even though beans make it a little easier, it's definitely lacking the auto-binding of EGL and JSF. And of course there's nothing like it in any of the CGI approaches.

Also, RBD and RDi can be co-installed. In fact, that's what IBM calls "RDi-SOA"; it's the two products in the same workbench.

Have you taken any of the distance learning courses from Jon Sayles? From what I understand those classes are really quite excellent.

Joe