The recent article about how RPG is seen as the only programming language for the IBM System i5 raised quite a few comments from readers. The article was more about how other languages are supported on the i5,yet as a group of i5 supporters and the media in general only ever talk about RPG. I know PHP and Java etc have been gaining some coverage of late but the majority of articles still talk about RPG and how to do interesting things with it! I still see articles on how happy we are that some college has decided to add RPG and the i5 to it IT courses. Lets no kid ourselves this is not going to encourage people to use the platform more. One respondent said they would never use anything but RPG for business logic as the others languages such as SQL and PHP Java etc. are not good enough for business logic??
In an attempt to help others see alternatives to the RPG language for crtical business logic I hope to produce a few code snippets that show how to do things such as read files, call API’s. create Interfaces using UIM etc. The code will eventually build into a tool for others to improve upon, hopefully others will post enhancements and new code snippets. This will not turn out to be an open source revolution, but it may encourage some to view the alternatives.
Couple of things I have in mind are
- Simple file reading writing and content display in C
- Read through a Journal
- UIM panel display
- Disk utilization
- Profile replication
If you have any suggestions for the kind of tool you would like to see produced let me know and I will see if it makes sense to build it for others to use.
Chris…