I finally gave in and installed the Websphere Development Studio for iSeries! I had installed the product many times in the past and always found it to be very heavy and cumbersome to use, the install was always a long running battle which usualy ended up with me stripping out the product after a few days. I have to say I am impresed with the improvements this time. I ordered the free Version 7 through IBM last week which arrived at our offices yesterday. I started the install around 6pm thinking I had the whole night to install and should have plenty of time (previous installs took hours). I installed the Quick Install CD thinking this would take me through to an installation, unfortunately it only had the pdf files which quite honestly seem to be a waste of time… But reading quickly through the PDF, it became obvious I just had to install disk 1 into the CD drive which I did and the installtion scripts started. I was presented with the normal preamble about license agreements and where to install etc plus a list of the features to install. I only wanted the RSE so I unchecked the rest of the options and started the install. It was finished within 5 minutes and only took 2 CD’s! Being shipped 9 CD’s certainly doesn’t make you think its going to be easy, but it was! I didn’t need the CDE as I dont use RPG, plus the servers are not being used on the i5 so installing them on the PC didnt make any sense. The defaults seem to be aimed at those developers who are going to use the full websphere capabilities so I can understand why they are there. I dont use Java either so I didnt even bother to install it, previously I seemed to install everything with the expectation that I would use it sometime!
Once installed I took the option to automatically start the Workbench which fired up in a lot less time than I remember it doing previously. The help information was very useful and easy to understand guideing me through setting up the connection to the i5. The use of filters to set the library list and work envirnment was fairly simple to understand and took little time to carry out. The next feature I liked was the verify option from the connections list. This went off to the i5 and checked the environment for me, it identified 7 PTF’s plus a WDS option I was missing. I used this information to Send a PTF order from the i5, (took about 10 minutes to complete) then installed the missing option from the Websphere LICPGM CD’s. Overall the install took less than 30 minutes, this is a lot better than the time it seemed to take with Version 6.0 and made a lot more sense. I only have the options I need (previously it installed CDE plus the server automatically? That could have been due to my understanding of the installation scripts?) and it starts and performs very well with little overhead. The C parser is very good and I even noticed error messages being sent to the editor, (I entered a close of a comment before I entered the start!) on correcting the error the messages immediately disappeared.
The main reason I installed the RSE was to reduce the amount of time I was staring at the green screen, it seemed to tire my eyes very quickly, but the ability to have multiple files open, allowing cut and paste between files plus having the files save directly back to the i5 is a very big bonus for me. I dont know if I was stupid or the product was harder to install from the earlier versions? But this seemed to be a breeze this time.
I have been resisting the move to the IDE for sometime based on my past experiences. But this has install has changed all that, I like the development environment with its features and feel it provides substantial benefits over the good (but old) SEU/PDM environment. Well done IBM!
Now its back to the grind stone!
Chris…