Visual Programming Tools Comparison

[Guest.Visitor]

We are starting to look at our programming tool options for AS/400 RPG. We have VRPG/Code400 under evaluation now. The $300 price per seat is hard to resist. But what else is out there? Anyone have any real world comparisons?

[Guest.Visitor]

Donald, The $300 initial cost will probably be about 1/500th of the total project cost. With that in mind, I would still spend the $300. Even if you do not use anything but the Code/400 component it will probably pay for itself in a few months. The next version of ADTS, which will have a WebSphere name, will also come with WebSphere Studio and the professional version of VA/Java. Both of these added products will include some AS/400 connectivity features. Are you up to re-architecting your applications? Are these new applications? If the answer to these is no, you can narrow your choices quite a bit and will likely find screen scraping solutions are enticing. Joe Pluta has some good ideas with re-vitalization, which he describes on his web site at www.zappie.net. The main advantage to VA/RPG is that the underlying language is familiar to RPG programmers. You can also use VA/RPG to generate Java classes, which I do not see as a strategic decision, but I have not tried this option. For some applications you can get away with web pages built with tools like Cold Fusion or Net.Data that access your database using ODBC. If you are willing to make an investment in your applications or are building new applications, your decision will be much harder. One reason for this is that it is not cheap to train your staff and throw away what you may already have. Java and SQL are likely to play a major part. You will also need to change the way you manage and distribute your applications. David Morris

[Guest.Visitor]

Try taking a look at LANSA (www.lansa.com) I've recently started using LANSA's Visual LANSA product and I was able to learn the tool rather quickly. From what I understand, the cost of the LANSA toolset is very reasonable. The nice thing is that LANSA is can be used on the AS/400 (green screens), on the web, and on GUI devices.