Time for More RPG IV Enhancements?

[MCWebsite.Staff]

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[David Abramowitz]

Time for More RPG IV Enhancements?

** This thread discusses the article: Time for More RPG IV Enhancements? **
Bob Cozzi wrote: Sure, it would be cool to have integrated CGI/Web built-in functions in RPG IV, but that would have been important in 1998, or 2002, or 2004, or 2006. In 2008 and beyond, it is sort of like adding pointer support to CL in 2006. There will be many responses to this article, so I may as well start off with mine. For many years, I have advocated developing a simpler native RPG way of working with web pages. This could be done with opcodes as opposed to APIs. Something like EXHTML might suffice. It would have to be accompanied by an SDA-like tool (perhaps as part of Eclipse?) for web page design. If MS can create Front Page express, I figure IBM can provide a tool that could interface better with the AS/400. Other opcodes should also be provided, the key (IMO) here is simplicity. Let the more complex functions be the reason to still use APIs. Dave

[2ndtim]

Time for More RPG IV Enhancements?

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Bob, how does an ordinary Joe like myself get the abiltiy to vote on these potential enhancements outside of COMMON?

[C Bougher]

Time for More RPG IV Enhancements?

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Here's an idea. How about "freeing" the rest of the specs. In fact, take away all fixed column usage completely. Then I can use whatever editor I want and put my source in stream files on the ifs. This covers all classes except maybe 5

[aikidaves]

Time for More RPG IV Enhancements?

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The RFC process could work, as long as IBM puts the right people in charge of it. (In other words, the ones that would recognize that my well-thought-out comments are more valuable than all the chaff submitted by people less erudite than myself. I'm sure that we all feel the same way, of course.)

[Guest.Visitor]

Time for More RPG IV Enhancements?

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Hi, How about an RFC requesting ideas for changes? I'm sure IBM have quite a few ideas that we can 'vote' on, but the guys in the RPG community who use RPG on a daily basis must have plenty of ideas that IBM haven't yet heard of. If there's an RFC for potential changes, then maybe IBM can get some more ideas before throwing the eventual possibilities open to discussion. Martin Gilbert.

[JohndeCoville]

Time for More RPG IV Enhancements?

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ASP.NET 2.0 is ten-times more effective than issuing CGI-API's or many of those other CGI-tools. Also JAVA sucks next to VB.NET in Visual Studio. WDSc 7.0 has a lot of improvements but the source load-up is bad PR for IBM. I also second the motion for RFC requesting Ideas for Changes. It is enormously empowering for the Developer Community but some folks in Editorial Boards have taken it into their heads that we don't understand enough to initiate and vote on changes. Or to evaluate IBM's changes. We are certainly qualified enough. When the higher-ups in the IBM or Technical Pubs circles decide that they have to decide for us, the I5xx community is doomed. --John

[Guest.Visitor]

Time for More RPG IV Enhancements?

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David, Not sure why you keep asking for this when it's already been done by several System i tools vendors, including my company. Also, the main reason IBM hasn't provided EXHTML is because that addresses only a very small part of the problem of moving from green-screen to web. The major problem is having to entirely restructure green-screen code to work according to the CGI model, where programs drop in and out of jobs as they display pages.

[Guest.Visitor]

Time for More RPG IV Enhancements?

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And what does 'effective' mean in this context? We have many clients running CGI applications on the System i who get incredible performance, scalability, security and reliability. I can send you names. Plus, there are web development tools for System i that are just as powerful (and in many cases easier to use) than Visual Studio.

[David Abramowitz]

Time for More RPG IV Enhancements?

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fbloggs wrote: Not sure why you keep asking for this when it's already been done by several System i tools vendors, including my company. IMO you are missing the gist of the article. If vendors have provided enhancements to RPG IV to the point where a rudimentary ability to display, send, and receive data from web pages are a native part of the language, then I am unaware of it. Dave

[Guest.Visitor]

Time for More RPG IV Enhancements?

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Do you mean 'functions provided by IBM' ? What's the difference between that and functions provided by vendors, which has been done. And, as I stated in my last post, it is highly unlikely for technical reasons that you will ever get what I suspect you really want- just changing EXFMT to some other opcode to magically handle web stuff.

[R.Cozzi]

Time for More RPG IV Enhancements?

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I think what he's saying is that MS spends the hours trying to make their IDE work and be integrated with their language(s). IBM's WDSC RPG IV integration feels like a patch or an add-on/afterthought. Some of the "sp" versions of CGI RPG that are our there do a nearly great job of providing similar capabilities for RPG, but those vendors are not Microsoft and thus don't have the $$$ to spend. But as I alway say "better" is the enemy of "good". Things can always be "better than", but what we really need is "good enough". VB.DOS, VB.blank, VB.DDM, VB.OLE, VB.OLE2, VB.NET, VB.Vista Funny how some people say RPG IV is "old". It is only 10 years old and yet VB is how old?

[Guest.Visitor]

Time for More RPG IV Enhancements?

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Bob, VB 1.0 was released in 1991 while VB 1.0 for DOS was released in 1992 for the QB crowd. I learned it in 1993 as VB 3.0. Tom.

[David Abramowitz]

Time for More RPG IV Enhancements?

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What's the difference between that and functions provided by vendors, which has been done. Welllll, for one thing, I don't have to prepare a cost justification paper. You may be right, in that it may never happen, but OTOH I've seen some mighty interesting things happen that many people have said would never happen. Some times the only reason things don't happen, is that people keep on saying that they will never happen. If you keep on saying something over and over again, and if you say it very loud people will start believing you. e.g. For many years IBM would officially state that there would never be any AS/400 functionality that couldn't be accessed from a command line. Dave

[R.Daugherty]

Time for More RPG IV Enhancements?

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Dave, I think IBM has supplied all they're going to supply in whatever Websphere ships with the system. And as any company looking to make more money they want people to pony up more for Websphere J2EE app server while not shortcutting their valuable vendor's products either. In addition Java open source software that are what other systems have as the equivalent, such as Sun's J2EE app server, are available as Java systems to run on the iseries. Same is true for PHP and other open source Apache modules. However, I believe you are right. No one ever talks about this or publically considers any of these issues in these forums, but if one is geared up for x number of 5250 sessions able to run, then the same number of resident CGI jobs would be able to run. There is direct equivalence in that. Yet what little actual architecture is ever discussed, and because it's so screwed up, it's almost a taboo subject, presumes the original HTTP assumptions of random viewing by anonymous sources, to be served in a timesharing fashion that leverages x CGI programs times average length of time between page requests. This is all fine and good for serving the masses with static data, but has no relevance whatsoever to a business application session. As we know regarding operating systems, this is even done with resident sessions and running jobs, where currently used sections of programs are mapped into memory while the remainder is cached to disk, at least those of us who remember when 4k slots from a job's program would be mapped into precious memory. Now software is engineered so poorly that it requires gigs of no longer precious memory to provide even worse response than we had with 4k slots and megahertz CPU's. But what do people like IBM care. They charge you for it. They take the easy way out on lowest common denominator cross platform software to keep their software development costs down and charge for massive amounts of memory and CPU to make it run almost as well as older software. What a racket. Anyway, that's all transparent to us. Whether small pages of memory of a shared program used by multiple people are currently in memory along with program variables for each session, or a behemoth JVM memory sucking black hole is in memory for each session, i5/OS(OS/400) has these sessions resident for an expected number of users. And let's face it. Also unstated and acted like it doesn't exist is that any or all of these 5250 sessions could be anywhere on the net. But go figure. Now we get to web access and all of a sudden people act like it's something entirely different. It isn't. You have a certain amount of people registered to log in and authorized to certain data. Why would these not be like 5250 resident sessions? Because they don't have to be? That's a direct space-time tradeoff in that time is taken to remove a program's environment and store it away to disk, and retrieve it the next time a web page request comes in from identifed connection, however identified (IP address, cookie data, etc.), this to free up space for a time slot for an access from another web user while the first page is being worked with by that user. But we have an operating system for that memory swapping stuff for resident sessions, so why is it different for processing CGI transactions? So IBM says in their doc, and I am not making this up, that more than four or five CGI jobs can take too much iseries resources, when we routinely have hundreds of jobs running on an iseries. That actually is more than ridiculous, it's ludicrous. So why can't RPG programs issue an EXFMT that is mapped on the fly to a 5250 session or to an HTTP connection, or to other sockets connections to desktop clients or other systems, and not "drop out" but stay resident until page returns or times out. What's different about business sessions like supply chain sessions with business partners than if they signed in on 5250 sessions? Nothing in terms of process. Now if this is already going on with some vendors or Websphere session stuff or whatever, fine, but basically web types say we're going to call the shots, we prefer SQL but if you really must do something, then just do it and go away. I see no reason why we shouldn't be calling the shots with our logic as we always have, in memory resident programs. It's just another client. IBM should be taking EXFMT and making it interface independent as on the fly mapping of the output buffer to appropriate syntax for the destination renderer, be it 5250, web browser, client with XUL, XML intersystem communications, etc. This information should be able to be determined by a standard iseries session naming standard. Websphere sessions would be an important part of that standard, just not the only part of it. rd