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Developing EGL Applications for the System i

This article will dive deep into the issues surrounding Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) development. But understand that it's with a heavy orientation toward the IBM* System i* platform development and even more specifically toward interaction with RPG.

I'm a green-screen dinosaur who's bootstrapped himself into this wonderful new Web world. In so doing, I've learned enough about Web application development to be dangerous. I've also run across a lot of hype.

I've lived through the PC wars, the OS wars, the Java* juggernaut and the open-source revolution. Back in my day, the up-and-coming one true language was Pascal. So you can imagine, I'm a little jaded on the idea of silver bullets in our industry. But from a purely System i platform-centric viewpoint, it's quite possible that EGL is as close to a silver bullet as you're going to see. It has the potential to be the most powerful tool introduced for the IBM midrange since RPG itself.

Whoa There ... RPG?

Yeah, I know. It's just not fashionable these days to be pro-RPG. But my experience shows me that, line for line, programmer hour for programmer hour, no language can beat RPG for building business logic. For more on the value of RPG, see the cover story, "RPG - Anchoring Your Team".

Lest the new technologists among us get indignant, understand I'm not talking about building rich user interfaces, designing stunning graphics or creating hot 3-D games. I'm not talking about CAD/CAM applications or weather forecasting. I'm talking about doing what IBM midrange computers have done for decades - get a lot of input, massage it and use it to generate information for end users. To do this, you need a lot of what I like to call data-driven business logic, meaning you read a record, inspect a field and, based on its contents, conditionally execute one branch of code or another. A little ways along that branch, you'll need to do the same thing. Part of this logic may include calculating other fields and then writing them to other database files.

At this, RPG is simply unequaled. (COBOL programmers might rightly argue this point, but I consider COBOL and RPG roughly equivalent in function - I sometimes call RPG "shorthand for COBOL.") RPG was the driving force behind the explosion of the System i platform and its proliferation throughout the world's manufacturing, distribution and financial sectors. To me, without RPG there would likely not have been the concept of Material Requirements Planning and later ERP. And without those, I don't think the computer would have made the inroads it has into everyday business.

I only bring this up because I want you to understand my position from the beginning. If you're of the opinion that RPG is a dead language, the rest of this article won't be of much use to you. But if you believe RPG is still the lifeblood of the small-business community (and IBM seems to agree - the enhancements to the language in the last 10 years or so have dwarfed those of the previous 25, in my opinion), read on.

The growing use of technologies like barcode scanners and radio-frequency identification chips increases the need for an interface that handles short, pre-formatted messages as quickly as possible.

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