Best language

[Guest.Visitor]

I'm new to the AS400 world and need to decide which GUI language to use to simultaneously access data from an AS400 and databases on a NT server. We do not have the staff to use anything that will require a lot of developement or learning time. Currently we use Synon as our main AS400 developement tool and want to choose something that would work well enough to eventually replace this. We have fairly small databases - 100,000 recs, 50 users and don't have much programming experience in any one language but are familur with VB. Any suggestions.

[Guest.Visitor]

I think you already answered your question by mentioning VB. VB is an excellent choice if you are writing to a Windows platform. Mark McCall

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On Wednesday, May 05, 1999, 04:38 PM, Ryan Booton wrote: I'm new to the AS400 world and need to decide which GUI language to use to simultaneously access data from an AS400 and databases on a NT server. We do not have the staff to use anything that will require a lot of developement or learning time. Currently we use Synon as our main AS400 developement tool and want to choose something that would work well enough to eventually replace this. We have fairly small databases - 100,000 recs, 50 users and don't have much programming experience in any one language but are familur with VB. Any suggestions.

[Guest.Visitor]

Ryan, As mentioned, VB might be the way to go, BUT I would suggest you take a look at Visual FoxPro. It is very VB-like but since it is at heart a DB development platform, it handles a lot of the table manipulation logic for you. Bill Ryan Booton wrote: I'm new to the AS400 world and need to decide which GUI language to use to simultaneously access data from an AS400 and databases on a NT server. . .

[Guest.Visitor]

If you use VB to link MS Access and AS/400 tables do you have to use Jet or can you use ODBC or OLE DB? I've read that I should stay away from Jet but it seems as though it is the only way this will work.

[Guest.Visitor]

Ryan, I have found linked tables to be too slow for all but the simplest of applications. If you think about it, a linked table is already an ODBC connection to an AS/400 file, so using ODBC to attach to the linked file seems like double jeopardy. Why not use OLE DB directly to an AS400 file, and forget about linking through Access? Mark McCall

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On Tuesday, May 18, 1999, 02:39 PM, Ryan Booton wrote: If you use VB to link MS Access and AS/400 tables do you have to use Jet or can you use ODBC or OLE DB? I've read that I should stay away from Jet but it seems as though it is the only way this will work.

[Guest.Visitor]

We had planned on putting some non critical data in Access databases for its ease of use, then link to our AS400 when we needed information from it. There's no reason that we have to do that, we could just keep everything on the AS400. Maybe this is a different subject but the version of IBM's SDK for ActiveX and OLE DB that I have doesn't work with VB6. And the version which does requires Client Access Express which we don't use. So, is there an alternative to IBM's SDK for OLE DB? I need to be able to build queries that pull data from multiple tables without having to type SQL statements. I don't think the Visual Data Manager that comes with VB will work with OLE DB.

[Guest.Visitor]

Ryan, May be you should take a look at ASNA's Visual RPG. GUI part of AVR is very close to VB, language itself can be close to RPG or VB. And best of all, their database engine will let you create AS/400 like files on the NT and programs will be able to have transparent access to the data on NT or AS/400. May be, some day, IBM will give us the same feature with VisualAge for RPG and UDB, but ASNA is already there. Max