One thought that might be relatively bite-sized....
You can do a plain old HTML mockup of your app if you use the Bootstrap HTML framework.
https://getbootstrap.com/
Bootstrap turns plain old HTML in to eye candy without needing much/if any Javascript knowledge.
You can test your HTML app by opening the HTML in your browser to view from a directory on your desktop or from Apache or another HTTP web server.
Build a little plain old HTML Bootstrap prototype that looks good and then you can replace the data that needs to be dynamic by using RPG/CGI and re-using some of your existing logic, PHP, Python or whatever else for the web bits.
Auto-refreshing dashboards are a great use for the Bootstrap HTML framework because you can do most of it with some simple HTML tables or other replace tags in the template.
I call them poor-man's dashboards.
What I often do is create an HTML file template with some placeholders for table data or other data so I can just replace those tags real-time with an app that runs periodically (every few minutes/seconds or nightly). And with an HTML refresh tag in the simple web page it looks like it's a fancy auto-refreshing app on the big screens.
Viola - Instant dashboard.
Regards,
Richard Schoen
Web:
http://www.richardschoen.net
Email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Phn: (612) 315-1745
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message: 1
date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 08:44:17 -0500
from: "Kelley" <kelley.work@xxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: [WEB400] Looking for Advice/Suggestions
I'm not sure if this is the right list...
I'm looking for advice/suggestions on how to change an RPG/green screen application to be accessible from a browser.
Last week I was at the RPG/DB2 conference in Minneapolis. A great conference as usual. I was particularly interested in the open source sessions and I'd like to try some of the techniques I watched being done.
The shop I work in has been a single person shop for a couple of years now (down from three people). All of our software was developed in-house over a period of many years. The code is mostly RPG400 and green screens. I write any new code using RPG Free and other newer techniques, however the applications are pretty stable so I don't write a lot of new code. My other responsibilities (PC's, networks, and so on) keep me from doing any refactoring.
The program I'd like to change is an RPG Free program that uses a green screen display to show current yield data to the manufacturing line (it displays a bar chart using control codes for different colors). It's displayed on a large screen TV that is visible in the plant. It refreshes every 15 seconds.
I'd like to update this process and move the display of the data to a web browser so it can be visible to those without an IBM i client.
This is not an area I have much experience in. The closest I've come is using CGIDEV to create a web page that displays sales data.
My question is, where to start? I've spent some time on the web looking at various ways to do this, I think there are about a million.
What's the best way to ease into this?
To help narrow options down a bit, I know RPG, C and SQL. I've done some simple HTML and CSS. I'm familiar with linux. I built a simple inventory app a few years ago using a LAMP stack and PHP. I'm currently learning Python.
Any and all suggestions are welcome.
Thanks, Kelley.
midrange.com
