Re: Why use PHP? What are the disadvantages?

Aaron,

I was just teasing Jon because he stated ealier that you always has to
learn new subprocedures as it was a problem.

Actually Jon lost track of powerEXT because he hasn't got or had a V5R4
mashine at the time I offered him a walk trough.

And YES, the documentation part is a big problem - powerEXT is quite
different - and a BIG framework and has a learning curve - and after
investing about a total 3-4000 hours in it I find it a little hard to find
founding to a "state of the art" documentation department that can keep up
with the past development and the ongoing development ;.)

Henrik





Med venlig hilsen/Kind regards
Henrik Rützou
HR Software Development
Ved Stampedammen 39
DK 2970 Hørsholm
Denmark
E-mail: hr@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Phone: +45 2714 8449

Homepage: powerEXT.com




Aaron Bartell <aaronbartell@xxxxxxxxx>
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Re: [WEB400] Why use PHP? What are the disadvantages?






Well, in the end, whether you use CGIDEV2/PowerExt/Valence/RPGUI/etc, you
still have to manually retrieve the values of the forms.

I don't think you are picking on the right person by stating Jon Paris
doesn't do/learn new tricks - he is an educator of new technology. I
think
his comments were more a long the lines of not being able to understand
how
everything fits together with PowerExt. That would be a reflection on
your
documentation. I would take that as valuable feedback and instead ask him
where he lost touch with what PowerExt is trying to accomplish. For what
it's worth, your code is very well organized, but not well documented
(i.e.
the doc blocks should be expounded on much more to give context). There
are
A LOT of components in PowerExt - I took the better part of a day to dive
into the source but stopped once I found the dual license in the back of
the
user manual - so make sure that you provide avenues for quick
understanding
for both the bit twiddler and the person that wants the first "hello
world"
app in 5 minutes.

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


On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 4:06 PM, <hr@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Aaron,

who forget's to update an variable ???

The bigger problem in a dynamic UI is what you do if the variable isn't

in

the UI ...

CGIDEV2: myField = zhbGetVar('ioField');

if it is not defined in the form your RPGLE myField will be blanked out

powerEXT: myField = getExtVar('ioField':myField);

if the field is not defined in the UI, myField will still have the same
value (it returns itself)

Jon Paris may say - but you have to learn new subprocedures and new

tricks

- yes, but just think of the alternative ;-)


/Henrik




Med venlig hilsen/Kind regards
Henrik Rützou
HR Software Development
Ved Stampedammen 39
DK 2970 Hørsholm
Denmark
E-mail: hr@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Phone: +45 2714 8449

Homepage: powerEXT.com




Aaron Bartell <aaronbartell@xxxxxxxxx>
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Re: [WEB400] 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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