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