Re: Impressions of EGL - Part Duex

"That's the type of development I did in the 90's, but moved away from it after it got too confining."

I hear you. Actually, I have experienced that quite a bit as I have taken a look at several frameworks, even lately. They look great after a few carefully targeted tutorials but then as I scale to something more complex, the efficiencies diminish and I find that it is quicker just to code the stuff myself rather than work around the limitations. I worked with an RPG 5250 template set just like that back in the 90's. You could crank out a CRUD application in an hour, but if you needed a fairly complex application with multiple sub files across multiple screens it got rather messy.

I am glad to hear that you have experience with something like VS and MS .Net because then you will appreciate (as you will find when you take a test drive) that EGL (so far) is NOTHING like that. Similar metaphor (drag and drop, point an click, fill in the blanks, just like the Dreamweaver you are familiar with) but the implementation of that metaphor is so much cleaner and logically laid out. And, you get that backend plumbing to boot. So far, EGL is running no where close to empty on that front.

I haven't had *that* much difficultly in hooking up HTML pages to backend processes (but EGL is easier and faster, IMHO - so far). Where I run into "framework" issues most commonly is that I'll see a web app design I really like, and which I can achieve by hand coding (with some work) but I haven't seen any frameworks (so far) that can keep up with the very diverse HTML page formatting I have seen out there in the web world. So, I am looking forward to the JSP/JSF stuff the week of June 2nd. Those are two technologies that I have very little experience with so it will be interesting to see what capabilities they bring to EGL.
I feel like that kid on the Life cereal commercial: "You try it.... No, YOU try it.....I'm not going to try it.....He likes it....Hey Mikey!" So far, and it may be too early to tell for certain, EGL looks more productive than what I have been doing to date. I don't really care if it's drag and drop, roll your own, assemble bits on a screen or draw on a piece of paper. My interest is producing stable, maintainable code, that meets customer needs and can be done profitably. I don't care if the framework is something I developed or even from Rational (gasp!). That is why I have looked at so many different frameworks. Not to find "the holy grail" of frameworks, but to find something I can use efficiently. Something that makes me more efficient than my competitors and thereby gives me a competitive edge.

I still recommend that you take an unbiased look (as unbiased as anyone can). There is more than meets eye (or the hype). You have to see for yourself.

Pete


Nathan Andelin wrote:

Pete Helgren wrote:
Nathan, I am a complete noob with EGL so you can
take what I say with a grain of salt.

Thanks for the lucid explanation. It's clear that EGL will appeal to developers that use Visual Studio and MS .Net. Drag & Drop. Point & Click. Fill in the blanks.

That's the type of development I did in the 90's, but moved away from it after it got too confining.

Nathan.