Although it's not really the focus of this entry, I just like saying that. It's such a good marketing phrase; I wish we'd see more like it. And we could, you know - the EGL team is putting together the kind of glitzy eye-catching technology that could be showcased everywhere from a YouTube spot to a Super Bowl ad (do I have to pay to say that?).

I guess though that catchphrase is indeed germane to this entry; in a way it really epitomizes a large part of what I want this blog to be about: moving the i into the future (I'm not going to make all the *i*'s blue this time - bold ought to be enough). I want to really delve into those areas where the particular strengths of EGL and the i work together the best. For example, in the case of the RSDC scheduler, Chris Laffra and I were able to make three technologies - EGL Java/WebSphere, EGL RUI and good old RPG - work together flawlessly. Development was at a pace unlike anything I've done in a long time, and the fact that we could concentrate on the business requirements rather than the plumbing allowed us to deliver code at the speed of thought. It was quite an exhilirating experience, actually.

But what exactly does that mean for my core constituency? What can EGL really do for the long-time IBM midrange customers? These are customers who have entrusted their business to the midrange since it had names like "System/3" and technologies like CCP, customers whose most important asset right now is not even their programs so much as their programmers - programmers with a skill set that all signs indicate is becoming harder and harder to find.

What can EGL do for these folks? Well, in my vision, EGL is nothing short of the wonder drug for these shops. First, it will allow procedural programmers to write web applications. The popularity of languages like Visual Basic and PHP ought to make it clear that not all code need be written in OO, and that procedural programming is still an important otol in the business toolkit. This is particularly good news for business programmers becuase the procedural nature of EGL removes one of the biggest hurdles between RPG/COBOL programmers and the brave new world of the web. The WYSIWYG design tools and the declarative nature of the EGL syntax is putty in the hands of people who have written RPG code.

Next, EGL allows the reuse of existing code and the productive employment of your programmers. You don't have to rewrite your programs in EGL, you simply have to extract your business rules and make callable business logic programs. EGL provides the plumbing. Once that's done, you can use the first level of EGL user interface, JSF, to write web applications with little or no requirements for HTML, CSS, JavaScript or any of those glue technologies. You write the EGL CALL instructions, create the pages with the WYSIWYG designer, and you're done.

But if the tool just put a new face on an old paradigm, it wouldn't be the future; it would just be a holding pattern. The future is where EGL really shines. Once you have your business logic encapsaulted in EGL library functions, you will be able to move forward into the world of AJAX and eventually to Rich Web Services (RWS or RUI, depending on which acronym you prefer). But the good news is that you don't have to do that wholesale. You can rewrite parts of your application with JSF (in fact JSF may be all you ever need for large parts of traditional green screen systems) and then apply the new technologies where they are best suited, such as for new executive dashboards or other Web 2.0 types of applications.

I always say thatyou should use the right tool for the job, and for i shops the right tool includes business logic on the i and then EGL for whatever user interface technologies are needed. The beauty is that the right tool for all of the new generation of UI jobs is EGL.

Well, of course it was William Shatner, not Captain Kirk, but it was still outstanding. Through a series of terrifically funny anecdotes, Shatner related the software development industry to the movie production industry, and often had the audience howling. It was all great fun.

Seeing my boyhood idol was just one more of the surreal bits of my time in Orlando. Through my own lack of prior preparation, I had to stay offsite, so both days I found myself cabbing through Disney World. It was always a bit of a mental clash to go from the high-energy environment of the conference to looking out the window of the cab and seeing the Tower of Terror.

I would have loved to stay longer, but there are just too many things to do back here at home. When I gave my session, it was clear that the attendees saw the power of the tool, and how EGL could provide them with the fastest way to extend the business logic behind their green screen code to the web and beyond. It's a great story: a few lines of code and you can call an ILE program. Drag and drop an array on a page, and you have a table of data. Or, check a box and turn a function into a web service. Just a few lines of EGL turns the IBM i into a full-fledged participant in modern application architectures.

But it doesn't stop there. Add onto that the new Rich Web Services capabilites and now you're at the very leading edfe of technology. I stuck my head into a Dojo session, and I know that the RWS team is looking at the GWTx toolkit. And that's what puts EGL head and shoulders above things like RPG-CGI and PHP. Instead of spending their time figuring out the plumbing needed to add basic web capabilities to their existing systems, i developers can use EGL to do the plumbing for them and can instead focus on architecting the next generation of applications.

Joe