Terminate the Teal Terminals

[MCWebsite.Staff]

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[dmashl@perkins1.com]

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Bob, I've been reading your columns since, well a long time anyway... My current employer is a food service distributor. We have about 40 customer service people using green screens. They can review the customer's prior orders, the customer's order book / price guide, credit status you name it with no drop down boxes, no point and click, (right? / left? double?) and can enter orders faster than you or I could say GUI. To think a heads down data entry application can be moved to GUI is lunacy! Once again, we have to know the application. Management that does not know or worse does not care is the enemy, not that great 5250 data stream!

[Guest.Visitor]

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IBM could help spur web development if they added some feature like PHP has to provide built in associative arrays of all of the server, GET, and POST variables. CGIDEV2 and CGILIB sound like good alternatives, but for ease of use, PHP's method would be preferable. Perhaps a pointer variable declared in the D specs with a keyword like SERVERVAR, POSTVAR, and GETVAR.

[belgorodskym]

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What Bob described happened at the shop where I worked for 3 years! A fast and reliable app on iSeries was replaced with an big exotic package. If I made serious efforts and refaced 5250 screens I could have saved my job and huge $$ the company wasted. Management that cares about long-term results is so yesterday. We cannot change it. Mike B

[T.Grove]

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I think the underlying issue here is that the new company/management that thinks the AS400/iSeries/i5 is SO Yesterday and LEGACY, just doesn't know the capabilities of the machine. Also, they don't care. They want pretty Windows(tm) screens, no matter the impact on productivity, or cost. (which is why I am learning MS Visual Basic, ASP.NET, C#) The Solution: IBM Marketing needs to get off it's butt. Showing the TV commercials (thank God we actually have some now), and saying how an i5 can consolodate servers is great if we are all going to Linux and AIX, but does nothing for the perception of the green screen as bad. There are many applications where you do not want to have a PC. One manufacturing company that I worked for replaced all terminals on the shop floor with PC's, and promptly lost productivity, AND got hit by numerous viruses because the shop floor people were surfing porn sites. GREEN SCREENS ARE NOT DEAD, AND IN SOME ENVIRONMENTS MAKE THE BEST SENSE! The Solution part 2: There are no programs in higher education that are teaching RPG or "legacy" programming, and IBM has done nothing about this. Is it any wonder that people graduating from colleges and universities come into the business world and see the AS400 and say "That's so old, let's replace it with this New Better technology" even if it is not better. The fact that there are NO new programmers being trained in RPG is the biggest thing that will kill the AS400 in the next 10-15 years, NOT that we existing programmers aren't upgrading our skillsets to use the web. (PS. how many employers out there tell their programmers "just learn it in your free time", and get results that are poor. Which makes them think that the As400 is a poor web box) Ok, I'm off my soap box now.

[R.Cozzi]

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I know character-mode (i.e., 5250 green screen) applications are best for shop floor applications. I've been there where they use keyboard "condoms" over the keyboard and random people come up and punch in some data. That isn't the point. The point is the pinheads that come into the company in a merger and acquisistion phase and say "Hey, they got green screen, dump it!" That is the current trend as I see it.

[JonFParis]

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"Management that does not know or worse does not care is the enemy, not that great 5250 data stream!" But "Management" make the decisions - so reality is hardly the issue - perception is. And the perception is that green screen is old-fashioned (and by definition therefore the iSeries is seen as old and out-of-date!). Unless you have the ability to convince every one of your current management chain (and any that you may inherit in the future) this is a losing game. If quality and capability mattered we'd be using OS/2 not Windows. We'd have used Beta not VHS. etc. etc. Perception is everything. By the way - it is possible to produce GUI interfaces that can perform well in a heads-down data entry mode - but they are _very_ hard to design. Green screen design can be truly horrible and not affect performance that badly. A bad GUI design on the other hand can be a disaster. Why not work to give your users/management what they want (and think they need) and make sure you do a good job of it. Why keep fighting the inevitable?

[JonFParis]

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As of V5R4 you have PHP on the i5 - so if you are already familiar with it why not use it? Even if IBM were to agree to add such features, it would be at least three years before you saw it on your production box. On the other hand you can use CGILIB or CGIDEV2 today. Or you can use your RPG skills to build stored procedures and access them via PHP scripts.

[David Abramowitz]

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Did the big exotic package work? If so, who took the credit? If not, who was blamed? Dave

[Guest.Visitor]

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We've had a similar situation happen at our company, i.e. new management comes in, immediately declare that RPG and the iSeries suck, then start hiring new people to implement any and every software package and hardware under the sun as long as it's not "green". Sometimes things just happen that you can't control but many times you can control your destiny, so if your are not in control of change at your company today, you can bet that change will be controlling you very soon and unexpectedly. Don't ignore Bob's advice.

[R.Cozzi]

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Sort of redundant to agree with someone who already agrees with me ... One thing to remember is people like to shop. More specifically, they LOVE to spend large amounts of money when that money is not thiers. Look at the cost of the movie "King Kong", was that worth $200+ million to produce? Doesn't matter, the fact is the Producer of that movie probably was trying to out-spend the last biggest movie budget so that he/she could walk around Hollywood and say "I produced the movie with the biggest budget in history". IT managers love an excuse to spend money almost as much as an elected U.S. Government official. So when they see an excuses like "green screens" they use it as a montra, like the acronym "WMD" and keep repeating it over and over again until people starting believing it. Green Screen is not the same level of deception as WMD, but the results are similar--they get to spend lots of money on something they're interested in--shopping, the skill of the uninformed and the missdirected.

[belgorodskym]

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Exotic Perl-based package did eventually work, after a lot of efforts. The weasels hired to write it got all the credit even though the users were disgusted. I detected and reported many bugs; consequently I was branded a pest and was laid off. Mike B

[R.Daugherty]

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Reacting to various posts in the thread, heads down data entry used to be called keypunching. There was no screen for it, you just looked down at the data to type, hence the term "heads down". So heads down data entry does not need a screen at all, of any type. Shop floor type environments can make better use of a mouse than most. It has nothing to do with a text screen versus web page but everything to do with being able to look at manual pages, diagrams, cross references, parts availablility with pictures, and on and on. Again, the simplistic myth repetition is not only wrong, it's wrong over and over, as if a zombie meme. What is required is hardening and protection from dirt, not a green screen. Sure, there's green screens out there, and DOS screens. I wrote a data collection system several years ago that some poor PC fed to an AS/400 while being bombarded with dirt and grime. A plastic enclosure protected it somewhat but the drives kept giving out. But I wrote the data to floppy as well so the data for the day was backed up there as well when the inevitable happened. So people will do wonders with what they have, be it DOS or 5250 or a browser, or preferably all three which is the way IT people should think. But they can do a lot more with a mouse and browser than most people that we are reputedly discussing here. So, yes, order entry, customer service, and most everything else that runs a business runs it best with a 5250 screen. That's proven and true and swore by the business that uses it, not swore at. The pretty screens stuff is shorthand from two camps, braindead IBM types and business types who are presumed to be braindead but don't give two hoots what is behind what they are demanding, so they are not braindead, they are demanding. The shorthand from the IBM side is, gee, look how easy it is to put a session screen out on a web page, whee, it's pretty. People will like me now. That is not the shorthand the business is using. They are describing software that collaborates, software that works together, software that exchanges information, software they rightfully demand and deserve. We pages don't do that. They are braindeader than 5250, which at least as a Windows program could with screen scrapers participate in some of that that business expects. So the interface needed is something like a Java canvas with broad connectivity to both the desktop and the web. 5250 can grow to that. And it isn't easy. But if we in the IBM world live and die by IBM's web pages, we will die. And I haven't touched whether people are writing an app for fleeting inquiries from anyone on the internet, common on web sites but uncommon in business, or writing apps in PHP and the like to save every variable away and restore your state when the identified user returns with another page, or full blown session integrity with an AS/400 job with the browser faking a 5250 session, but in any event, these are the important things, and like I say, it is not even touched. People buy what they are used to, not cluelessly what is pretty. They buy apps. We used to have them, and web pages don't make apps. Apps should be interface independent anyway. Hardcoding HTML generation in with your business logic instead of EXFMT cannot in any way be considered an advance. A Java canvas can display text in different fonts and colors, and have URL links, and display images. But you shouldn't have to pick up a mouse unless you want to. At least business people won't do it unless it's productive, like pulling up a shop manual. See shop floor. rd

[David Abramowitz]

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I have also seen this backfire against a new management team. They come in with the attitude as you have described, but without a plan to examine the existing features and functionality. A new system may be delivered out of the box with little input from the people who understand how the company works. Often (according to empiricism) I.T. budgets are exceeded by several hundred percent, implementation is delayed by years, and former functionality needed for the operation of the business is lacking. What happens next is interesting and varied.

[*]The new system is scrapped.[*]Parts of the new system are partially implemented and the company continues to chug along under the old system.[*]The new system is put into play despite the flaws, and the blame is thrown onto the developers of the old system. Users are afraid to complain.[/list]There are other scenarios depending on the level of politicization. Dave

[H.Boldt]

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Bango: Can you not do CGI using RPG today? Is IBM not encouraging and supporting web development today? Jon's right - if you're waiting for more CGI-oriented ease of use features to be added to RPG, you'd be in for a long wait. And your competitors will be light-years ahead of you. You have choices today. You can use CGIDEV2 using RPG. You can use PHP. You can use JSP and Java. You can code CGI apps using any of a number of other languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby, all of which provide full-featured web app frameworks (not just procedure libraries). Each has their own advantages and disadvantages. As a computer professional, you have a responsibility to your employer, and to your own career development, to understand at least some of the alternatives. If you don't, your employer may well look for someone who does. Cheers! Hans