EGL and i

Notes from iSeries DevCon

JoePluta — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:13:36 GMT

I haven't been posting this month because I've been really busy getting ready for iSeries DevCon. This is one of the best technical conferences, although you might consider me a little biased; in four days, I give one all-day jumpstart (this year on migrating from PDM and SEU to RDi) and then 10 sessions and hands-on labs. It's always been a forward-thinking conference; I did sessions there on Eclipse and Visual Age for Java (Eclipse's predecessor) as far back as 2001, along with some of my first web-enabling sessions.

Since then, they've always been ready to present the latest technologies and so this year I gave what I'm pretty sure was the first hands-on EGL lab at an i technical conference, along with a number of other sessions and labs ranging from multi-tier architecture development to extending Rational tools with Eclipse plugins. My session on Eclipse, WebSphere and Rational was repeated, and even though the second one was in the last slot on the last day, we still had good turnout.

In the i space, EGL has to deal with all the buzz surrounding PHP and MySQL. To me, that buzz is nothing more than white noise because PHP just doesn't stand up to EGL when it comes to ease of use, adoption of advanced technology and integration - especially with the i. As a simple example, PHP's connection to the i involves using a PHP knockoff of IBM's Java toolbox, and while the toolbox is phenomenal technology, using it directly requires a lot of code; a simple program call might require dozens of lines of code. With EGL, it's a simple CALL statement. And when I demonstrated how easy it was to build entire applications using RDi-SOA to write EGL front ends and RPG back ends, people started getting excited. In a simple 90-minutes lab attendees with no prior Java experience were able to create an EGL record, build a JSF page, then flip over to the RSE perspective to compile the RPG business logic, and then back to the EGL to add a few lines of code to attach the two.

I also did a lab on multi-tiered architecture without EGL (using plain old JSP and Java) and the people who attended both really got an understanding of what EGL was all about: simplifying the plumbing. Even the simplest web application requires a significant amount of plumbing code in any 3GL, whether it's Java or PHP or RPG-CGI. EGL removes all of that for you. Not only that, but the very nature of the language makes it easy to reuse code, so that once you've created a JSF client, it's simple to turn around and create a rich client or a web service. I think that really hit home with a lot of the attendees.

Anyway, I'm back now and I'm focused on the Rich UI book. You'll see a lot more about that in the coming weeks. It's good to be back, and thanks for reading!

EGL Rich UI - The Next Generation

JoePluta — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:03:23 GMT

RUI-TNG?

No, seriously, what I mean is this is the next generation of posts on the RUI topic. A month ago I wrote that some exciting stuff was in the works, and now I can tell you about it. This will actually be a short blog entry - I just want to let you know what's coming.

Briefly, I'm writing a book. The book is going to be about using RDi SOA to build EGL Rich UI applications with the i. EGL Rich UI is the "formal" term for RUI, and if you haven't played with it yet, you should get yourself down to the alphaWorks site and get a copy (and yes I know the page says EGL Rich Web Support, but I have it on good authority that EGL Rich UI is the official name).

The book will show how to build a Rich UI interface using EGL and then connect that to a business logic back end written in RPG. Every step of the way will be written and debugged using Rational tooling.

And those of you who read my blog will get an inside look into the process of writing a book. It may inspire some of you to try your own hand at it. Those of you with clearer heads will run screaming...

Anyway, that's the short version. This ought to be an interesting project...

Rich UI and I (and i)

JoePluta — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:25:06 GMT

Hello there! It's been a very hectic few weeks here with lots of projects (some of which I can tell you about, some of which I can't... yet). I haven't been able to post as much as I had liked but I hope to be able to fix that over the coming months. I especially hope to give you some updates regarding the Rich UI and how that particular code works with the i.

To start with, I've managed to create end-to-end rich applications using nothing but the Rational tooling. These applications run from a Rich client in the browser written using the latest RUI release, through a web service written in EGL using RBD 7.1, to an RPG program written using RDi 7.1. It's fast and easy - the entire web service infrastructure, for example, only took a dozen or so lines. I'm looking forward to the day when all three components live together in a single workbench, but for now it's pretty easy. In fact, I run all three tools on my desktop at the same time in less than 1GB of memory (my Firefox and Thunderbird take up more!).

I've begun playing with the various widgets, including the Dojo widgets. I created a simple application that invokes a web service to get data and then shows that data side-by-side using a regular Grid object and a DojoGrid. I'm finding some interesting things about developing, including issues with the debugger and with passing complex objects (remind me to explain why you can't create a factory function that returns a DojoGrid).

All in all, it's been very interesting. Unfortunately, the real projects are taking most of my time, so I don't have a lot to share publicly this post, but I hope to be able to tell you more about some of those projects soon. And in the meantime, I'll try to keep updating you with what I've been up to. I see if I can figure out how to post my end-to-end HelloWorld application later this week.

Thanks as always for reading!