Re: Why use PHP? What are the disadvantages?

but Open Access doesn't seem to give us anything we didn't have before.

The one thing it does give that I don't believe we had before is the ability
to update "private" variables in the business logic program from the Open
Access program. This is similar to how JSF works in that you can have a
POJO (Plain Old Java Object) that has it's getter/setter methods exposed to
the JSF lifecycle so form variables can automagically be mapped to them when
the request comes to the server.

If you are familiar with CGIDEV2 you could think of it as not having to call
an API to retrieve query string variables and instead the variables would be
populated for you. A definite time saver both from a typing standpoint and
a "oops I forgot to load that variable from the query string" standpoint.

Probably more than anything I am excited about the precedence I hope this
sets of RPG getting more "face time" within the Rational group. Next I hope
they free form the whole language for public acceptance purposes.

Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
http://mowyourlawn.com/blog/


On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 2:58 PM, <BButterworth@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Ouch! Sad but true, I think. I have been wondering if I was missing
something, but Open Access doesn't seem to give us anything we didn't have
before. If anything it adds a layer of obfuscation, and I don't think it
is going to eliminate the need to learn HTML+CSS+Javascript and/or a
WYSIWYG editor for developing browser UIs.

As you mention, we can currently develop event-driven (front-end)
solutions using a framework like ExtJS to call RPG programs/procedures on
the back-end. This seems more straight-forward and is what packages like
Valence are already doing. There probably won't ever be another officially
supported IBM solution, but that may not be a big deal since server-side
languages are more and more being replaced by Javascript or plug-in
technologies for the UI anyway.

Blake



In other words... it's a screen scraper. It's a temporary stop-gap
solution to help us make progress until we rewrite our programs to use
the proper paradigm. At least, it *can* be a stop-gap solution like that
-- provided we pay for it, and we also pay for a 3rd party handler. By
itself, open access doesn't even give us THAT much.

If you think open access gives RPG a future -- I'd say you're high. It
pushes RPG more and more into the ranks of being a legacy language. And
it provides once and for all that IBM doesn't care about RPG enough to
give us a real solution.

A real solution will be event-driven...
What we don't have is a single, common, regular interface that everyone
uses
across the board that's "part of" RPG. And Open Access is making
absolutely NO effort to provide this.
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