Re: Would you take a complimentary course on HTML from a company whose website looked like this?

Wouldn't that depend upon your definition of "parse"? I have settled into using jQuery and JSON pretty much exclusively these days (with a little bit of Freemarker to load in some variables at page rendering time). And it seems to work fairly well. It is human readable and fast. If you DID have a fixed length data structure, then at some level that structure is still "parsed". Somewhere, the data in the structure is broken into its disparate parts for the program to use. You might be able to argue that there are more efficient levels at the MI/OS levels that could handle this, but just imagine if the same level that "parses" the data structure could do the same to a JSON string or any other kind of data. My guess is that it would be pretty efficient. If I follow your thinking, your data structure construct would map into a DS in RPG, yes? I don't know what the exact mechanism is that takes the data and maps it into the structure but I would think such a thing would be possible with other "structured" data as well. Imagine a JSON data type in RPG that would map the data into memory for use by the program.

That is all I can muster, thought-wise, with only two cups of coffee...

Pete


Aaron Bartell wrote:

The combination of XML data and XSLT transformation(s) into XHTML is very

powerful.

Powerful as in flexible, yes, but it comes at a cost. That XML had to first
be serialized on the server, deserialized on the client, then the response
would need to be serialized on the client and deserialized on the server.
There are a good number of CPU cycles used in the name of open spec
technologies.

If you own both ends of the spectrum (i.e. the server language the the
client Javascript) then why not come up with a solution that is more
efficient? Note that I am just introducing this argument into the
conversation and am currently somewhat of an offender of using popular data
transmission mechanisms simply because they were quick to implement (i.e.
ExtJS + JSON + RPGUI).

At the end of the day there will always be new ways to talk to the client
which will require you to retool (i.e. JSON and XML will give way to xyz
technology). So the argument of choosing something that is popular isn't
always a good argument (one that I include in my presentations - hypocrite?
maybe :-) What if we developed a hybrid approach to the libraries at hand?
What if we passed fixed length data structures back and forth from RPG to
Javascript in the browser? Would the bandwidth of the untrimmed characters
offset the benefits of not having to "parse" on the server?

This is more of a brainstorming post than anything. I myself am not totally
convinced of my argument yet. Thoughts?

Aaron Bartell
www.SoftwareSavesLives.com