IBM's Commitment to VARPG

[Guest.Visitor]

I have a great interest in VARPG as a PC/400 platform. My greatest concern is IBM's commitment to VARPG. I've not heard of herds of RPG programmers beating down IBM's door to get at this new compiler eventhough the learning curve has got to be less great than going to JAVA. With that in mind, I am concerned with the support/development that IBM will give/not give to this product. As a developer, giving up 6 months of company assets to a project that will be dead in 2 years because IBM will no long support/develop on that compiler sounds like a REALLY bad idea. If I could find a comfort zone in some type of commitment, that would put VARPG in a true running for a multi-platform product.

[J.Pluta]

On Monday, June 14, 1999, 06:33 AM, Deborah Lemer wrote: I have a great interest in VARPG as a PC/400 platform. My greatest concern is IBM's commitment to VARPG. I've not heard of herds of RPG programmers beating down IBM's door to get at this new compiler eventhough the learning curve has got to be less great than going to JAVA. With that in mind, I am concerned with the support/development that IBM will give/not give to this product. As a developer, giving up 6 months of company assets to a project that will be dead in 2 years because IBM will no long support/develop on that compiler sounds like a REALLY bad idea. If I could find a comfort zone in some type of commitment, that would put VARPG in a true running for a multi-platform product.

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While I'm not all that familiar with VARPG, Deborah, I think IBM still has interest in supporting it. It looks like they're moving it to merge with VAJava, to be honest, because now the workstation code generated can be Java. To review this and other V4R4 enhancements, click href="http://www.software.ibm.com/ad/as400/v4r4.html#varpg">here. src="//www.zappie.net/java/_derived/index.htm_cmp_zero110_vbtn_p.gif" width="140" height="60" border="0" alt="Zappie's Java Home" align="middle"> Zappie! - where the AS/400 speaks Java with an RPG accent

[Guest.Visitor]

I've not heard of herds of RPG programmers beating down IBM's door to get at this new compiler even though the learning curve has got to be less great than going to JAVA. The reduced learning curve is just about the only thing that VARPG has going for it. Even that's missing the point a bit. OK, the learning curve's easier so it's going to take less time to train up your staff. But what happens if someone leaves and you need to replace them? What do you reckon the chances are of being able to employ someone who knows VARPG well enough to hit the ground running? You'll end up having to go through the whole learning curve again to get them up to speed. Yes, Java is harder to learn than VARPG, but in the long run the benefits of going Java rather than VARPG are well worth the extra effort involved. And although the streets aren't exactly lined with Java programmers looking for work, they're easier to find than VARPG programmers. My greatest concern is IBM's commitment to VARPG . . . I am concerned with the support/development that IBM will give/not give to this product. Me too. I can't see IBM really putting much effort in to supporting this product. It's never going to have a big market share, and it simply doesn't have the strategic importance that Java has for IBM. I'm not knocking VARPG as a product, but it has been rather overtaken by events in the past couple of years. And if you're working exclusively with Windows as your client end (which most people are at the present time), there are a lot of good languages and tools on the market which are easier to learn than Java but which can be used in conjunction with ILE/RPG to write very powerful applications. IBM are very much focused on Java, but there are plenty of good applications around written in Delphi, for example. It depends on where you want your development to go, long term.

[David Abramowitz]

I recently attended a user group meeting, where George Farr was the guest speaker. George is current father of all IBM RPG development. He assured our group that IBM is committed to the RPG and VARPG languages for many years to come. We also learned of future enhancements, but most of them appear to be different ways of doing the same things currently available. David Abramowitz