Re: Great new Rich UI features in RBD 8

On 11/21/2010 7:03 PM, Peter Connell wrote:

Joe,

I'm quite conversant with the "underlying technologies" you mention and fairly good with Apache.
But I guess I'm one of those older guys who learnt and still gravitate toward cutting all code via a text editor or SEU. I can use Excel when I have to.
Attempting to roll out software that requires client installation and licensing costs per seat in an organization that administers a form for everything has always put me off.
I fear that first I may have to find/install/learn an "Eclipse" framework, then find/install/learn a "Websfear" framework before being able to do "easy" rich GUI stuff with EGL.
In such a small shop I'm the someone who is expected to understand "what's in there" when things don't work.

It would be nice if it was all just easy, right, and I bet it's not free.
But I may be prepared to give RDB 8 a go if I am able to explain some well defined steps to getting started, which I hope is what you were suggesting you may produce.

BTW. I found RDB 8 on the download section of the RDB website and it's not small, of course, so IBM's suggestion to expedite this with their Download Manager seemed like a good idea.
Then I rediscovered that, unfortunately, installing anything on a PC is difficult in a company that jealously guards admin rights and has a firewall that can confound subsequent connections.
Nothing is ever "easy".

I thank you for the time and expertise you provide.

Cheers, Peter

You have to learn to install and use Rational products, Peter, otherwise this whole exercise is moot. We are past the days when you can use a text editor to create modern UI code. Even the PHP folks will tell you that. You CAN write code in PHP. You can't do it productively.

As to the bits about Rational vs SEU: First, ADTS (that is, PDM and SEU) are no longer free. As of V6R1, you have to pay individual seat licenses for these tools. Not only that, but SEU is dead. There will be no more development in SEU. It won't even support new keywords. They've already done that with SDA (try modifying the WDWTITLE keyword in SDA).

As to the installation of the tools, it's about as simple as it can get. There is no framework to install, it's part of the package. RBD comes with a WebSphere Test Environment integral to the package. You install RBD and you're done - you can immediately start building and testing EGL code. RDPi is the same - you download and install the package and you're immediately able to use it to write RPG code.

To get the two to work together you simply ... INSTALL THEM TOGETHER! Really, it is that easy.

I'll try to put something together, but I highly recommend you try to get past your internal admin folks and get at least one of the products installed. RDPi would be my recommendation, because the move to GUI will occur while you're doing something familiar, but that's just me.

Joe