It's Time to Get out of the Stone Age

[Guest.Visitor]

It's Time to Get out of the Stone Age

Can linoma convert MOVE? I bet not! If it can, I want a proof that it can convert the following. If it can't, Brad Stone's "Beautification Utility" which used to free of charge, was no different. Even my enhancement of the utility (used to be open source those days) could not convert the following.

---

Code

[Guest.Visitor]

It's Time to Get out of the Stone Age

Thanks for the link. Hmmm. As I suspected, it was just a game of terminilogies. I had the concepts but did not know the buzz word Well buzz words count becuase they work during the interviews and gets you a job. For example my room mate forged his resume to show SAP experience but failed during the interview when he pronounced SAP as "sap" instead of "ess-aye-pee" and FICO as "fico" instead of "F.I.C.O" Speaking of SAP, they call it athree-tier architecture namely: 1. The user interface layer 2. The business logic layer 3. The data base layer

[Guest.Visitor]

It's Time to Get out of the Stone Age

The honorary professor Boldt is my Guru for the past six years. Well he has been teaching to Gurus but don't expect them to admit that

[R.Daugherty]

It's Time to Get out of the Stone Age

I admit I expected a lot more lecturing from the gurus about MVC when you said you hadn't heard of it. A Google of MVC turns up 22,200,000 hits. You can't even entertain the most trivial of discussions on the internet involving a web page guy without hearing bonafides established: my model is yada yada, my view is yada yada yada, and so on. All this to justify that a primitive web page can't handle anything else. Just makes my heart swell with pride to listen to it. rd

[R.Daugherty]

It's Time to Get out of the Stone Age

Here are some thoughts on evolving. PHP is coming. It puts out web pages, and we evolve. I've had PHP for four years. My web site runs on it. I've made a few minor mods to it, retrieve some data for my home page with it. I considered recoding my Java Double Deck Pinochle game in it just because I have PHP on my hosted web server and PHP is so simple they know and trust it and Java is an unknown beast. Or something like that. So I consider it. hmmmm, code is easy, they say. Interpreter Basic was easy too, wasn't it buckaroos. You know why? Because you don't have to (gasp) declare variables. You know, where we stick a 10 or a 3.0 or something off to the right to (gasp) declare it? That's too hard. PHP is easy. Now get to work on that e-commerce package. Speaking of which, I did a little survey of what was written in PHP. I didn't find anything like we write. I knew the problems I would face. There's no program with variables that screens go back and forth to like we have. Every web page coming in starts everything all over. Compiling PHP code. Figuring out if it's Groundhog Day and you've seen this before, and you have every variable of what you were doing for that user, and oh by the way, this is the web, good luck with the hordes of PHP attackers out there, and you have this PHP program compiled again now, better watch how much code this module has, the user is waiting, then pull from the database session records of everything you had going in the program last screen in, then oh, something to justify all this, look up something in the item file and add it to a newly generated web page and send it all back, save everything you had going, and shut down. Till next screen. Oh yes, so much more evolved. I think I'll have a martini I feel so sophisticated. rd

[AVROHOM]

It's Time to Get out of the Stone Age

Let me give some examples when introduction to new technology had lost good old stuff: 1. Remember AUTO report on RPGII? It had 2 functions: 1) /COPY statement, it was used primarily to have the File descriptions of the flat files 2)Automation of designing Headers+details of a report. When IBM introduced RPGIII with it's DATA-BASE, it was not needed any more the /COPY function of auto report, but it was still needed the function of designing automatically a report. But for some strange reason AUTO REPORT in RPGIII was not able to work with external described files. So there was little use of AUTO REPORT any more, and in RPGIV it was abandoned completely. 2. Commands. This is one of the most beautiful things on AS400. It is OBJECT ORIENTED. It has Default Values, which makes it easy to use even a command with 50 parameters. Imagine if instead of using CPYF we would need to use some kind of an API.. and the list goes on... Now it looks like IBM is killing the command interface. 1) IBM is trying to persuade us to use procedures instead of program calls. Procedures at the time being do not have the ability to have a command interface. 2) New Date-Time functions and variables were not introduced in the Command Interface. 3) NEW API Functions are introduced without giving an easy to use command interface for them. We users should demand from IBM not to lose the good old stuff when going to new technologies. We need to demand from IBM to improve the old stuff to be in line with all the new technology, or have in the new technology all goodies we had in the old technology.

[Guest.Visitor]

It's Time to Get out of the Stone Age

In the early days of my career, I found Auto particularly useful when making a conversion from Cobol based mainframe to RPG based midrange. While most was Cobol to Cobol, there was RPG rewrite where it had Report-Writer function, something not supported on midrange Cobol. Well those were the days of flat files. 22 years later, I was again given a similar project i.e. port a Cobol application from 390 to AS/400. This time I did not find the use of Auto as I was suppose to rewrite the entire application in RPG, with externally described files including print files.

[Guest.Visitor]

It's Time to Get out of the Stone Age

I rarely use printer files these days. Most everything now is an email, with a CSV attachment of some type. In fact, if someone requests a spool file report, I steer them away from that. I tell them that if I give them a CSV file, they can open it in Excel and sort the columns any way they want (they are empowered). Chris

[H.Boldt]

It's Time to Get out of the Stone Age

Back when RPG III was developed on the S/38, the autoreport component was simply ported from another system. Although the rest of the RPG III compiler was reasonably well structured, the code for autoreport was the most butt-uuuugly code imaginable, with a density of goto statements that I never would have thought possible in production code. As a result, one should not expect much in the way of support of that component, let alone enhancement. When RPG IV was being designed, it was determined that the main use of autoreport was for /COPY, which could easily be added to the compiler. Cheers! Hans

[Steve.Kiferd]

It's Time to Get out of the Stone Age

I think IBM's biggest mistake was not dropping backward compatibility of S/36, S/38 and RPGIII a long time ago. If they had most of the discussion today would be a moot point. I also think you would see more current and modern business applications running on the system. No one (not in-house or vendors) had any real reason to change and many have remained complacent milking the cash cow. Many make fun of MS because they don't support older software architectures in their OS moving foward but look at what its done for their development community. Had they kept all the backward compatibility I bet there would be a lot more DOS applications out there than there are today. They forced software development and modernization by changes in their OS.

[Guest.Visitor]

It's Time to Get out of the Stone Age

Indeed printer files are being replaced by other forms of communication by literate users. In my present company, highly literate users know how to run queries and extract data. They then important these files into MS-excel thru MS-Query and flip data around for analysis. In my previous company, the users were not that literate and I used ASC-SEQUEL to send .xls files. But then there were guys there who needed "Data Cubes" for user with Business Intelligence software Cognos. In the company before that I was sending XML files, and in the company before I was emailing spool files to users and electronic bills in NSF format to customers. However there are few old school users here and there who want hard copy printout so that they may use pencils and highlighters

[spark@wabutler.com]

It's Time to Get out of the Stone Age

CVTRPGSRC will take RPG to ILE RPG, and WDSCi version 6 will convert ILE RPG to /free: from the menu bar in WDSCi, select "Source" / "convert all to /free". You'll have to tweak the code for file I/O using indicators, but it'll get the code to free-form.

[Guest.Visitor]

It's Time to Get out of the Stone Age

That true, if you don't mind all of your MOVE's surrounded by /End-Free and /Free statements. Chris

[Guest.Visitor]

It's Time to Get out of the Stone Age

My point simply was that all of your modules should be ILE RPG. Will these tools convert all the uses of MOVE?? No probably not. As I stated at a MINIMUM the programs should be ILE RPG. This will allow the use of the current features without being restricted by RPG III. In regards to you move questions the answer is "mostly" yes!! " MOVEL 'HASSAN' WSNAME 14 <<<<< NO " " MOVE 'ABC' WSXYZ <<<<< YES " " MOVE 'FAROOQI' WSNAME <<<<< YES " The freeware tool is "smart" enough to convert most MOVE's based on the field attributes (since the tool uses the external and/or internal field definitions). It also does an exceptional job of creating the appropriate IF's and EVALS. Again... All I am saying is that all of your RPG modules should be ILE RPG and this can be done without ANY code changes! At a maximium??? It would be a perfect world!!

[nandelin]

It's Time to Get out of the Stone Age

We're still seeing revolutionary new breakthroughs in browser technology. Thank goodness for those pioneers who had enough vision to establish and promote open standards. Add CSS, JavaScript, and asynchronous request processing (AJAX) along with HTML to your list of things to master. The applications I've been working on lately have a point and click as well as keyboard oriented interface, offering the smooth richness of a desktop based GUI, while hosted under the native virtual machine of the iSeries, having performance and scalability comparable to 5250 interfaces. A key is having server applications that incrementally update portions of an HTML page while responding asynchronously to browser keypress and mouse events. One thing that I'm anxious to try is a UI component that combines a text box with a popup list where the items in the list are incrementally and asynchronously updated by the server as the user begins typing into the textbox, offering something of an intellisense effect for data entry. For example, if a mailing address or portions of an address exist in a file, let the server fill in values as you type. In the near future browsers may be considered better for heads down data entry than 5250 screens. It's interesting how the tables turn. During the past 25 years thick applications have hungrily consumed ever-increasing desktop resources. Now it looks like folks at MIT might successfully launch a program supplying millions of low-cost laptops to students around the world under a program named One Laptop Per Child. I'm really impressed with the specifications of the device which offers a small footprint from both a hardware and software standpoint. The key will be having wireless access to rich network applications and resources hosted on servers. The device itself isn't intended to have the capacity to run Java or Windows. It will run a small footprint version of Linux, Firefox, and a number of other open-source programs that fit on flash memory. It's interesting to see the pendulum swing. Nathan M. Andelin