Re: Flex & RPG

Stuart Milligan skrev:

Thorbjoern,


I wouldn't say we wrote this investment off, but rather as you point out it
was manifest in a completely different end result than we originally
envisioned 12 years ago. More than happy to chat with you about technology
and experiences in the java world. It would be nice to know that the
investment is being appreciated for as long as possible J Java is still very
much strategic but increasingly we see its role in the framework and
business logic as most relevant. As a company we are brutal when it comes to
assessing development productivity

It is important to find the right time to let a given technology go.

How would you like to start that? Tell me a bit more about what you are
doing and/or I will also make a list of bullet points about experiences that
you can take shots at. That should get things going nicely. If you are on
linked in I would prefer to do it there, as it's a LOT easier to follow a
discussion in that format. If not midrange.com is fine

We have a legacy system written in Cobol which our customers are basically happy with, but which suffers from all the usual issues with AS/400 applications. Green screens, hard to exchange files, etc.
The stuff we cannot do easily in Cobol, we do in Java (mostly by me) like automated ftp transfers, XML transformations and manipulations etc. We made a decision a while back that our Java components should behave like our Cobol components as seen by the programmers, which has worked very well, but due to the startup time of the JVM we only do very large chunks like an embedded web server. I'd wondered if we could get access to the 5250 facilities, but for batch jobs it works really nice.

My interest is learning how to efficiently do things on the AS/400 using Java - things I haven't thought of my self, things that might be differently done in Java than in the Cobol mindset, and perhaps even doing things in the Flex mind set, may save us a lot of time, which is interesting with few developers.

I am currently adapting a JSF-application and it takes quite a while to first get the basic screens and then getting them to look nice. Anything that buys time here, is interesting.