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Analysis of News Events
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After attending a briefing couple of weeks ago at IBM's Rochester facility, I realized that the technology side of iSeries computing is moving as fast as ever. There are planned improvements in V5R2 (pre-announced earlier this year) that we expect to see shipping by the end of 2nd quarter 2002. Some of those announcements are in good old RPG IV, a lot of them are in the area of DB2 UDB, and still others are in the area of WebSphere.

Probably most critical to RPG and iSeries/AS/400 developers is the move to a unified development environment. IBM is slowly migrating its entire set of development tools to its open source-based Eclipse development environment.

The Eclipse Web site states that Eclipse is an "open platform for tool integration." IBM spent about $40 million developing Eclipse and then "gave it away," said one IBMer who ask not to be identified. Eclipse is the foundation for all new releases of IBM-built development tools. CODE/400 has already been ported to Eclipse as a plug-in, and it's being rewritten as a native Eclipse plug-in, meaning it is being ported to Java. (So much for speed.)

Several vendors are participating in the Eclipse initiative, including Borland, Red Hat, Merant, Rational, SuSE, TogetherSoft, Sybase, Serena, and, of course, IBM.

I've used the Eclipse development tool for editing XML and a few other non-RPG documents. It is not as easy as, say, the Microsoft Visual Studio, but it is light-years ahead of what IBM was offering with its potpourri of development tools.

Eclipse is, as indicated, written in Java, but the development team made a design decision to avoid using the painfully slow Java Swing user interface controls. Instead, they chose to use a thin Java wrapper around the native operating system user interface controls. So under Windows, Eclipse has a Windows look and feel, while under Linux, it has a Motif look. This not only gives you a great interface, it also provides much better performance than Swing does. After all, "fast Java" is an oxymoron.

If you were a fan of CODE/400 or CodeStudio, you should be able to easily adapt to Eclipse. Eclipse has an interface that looks like the CodeStudio interface, which is much better than the labyrinth of clumsy dialog boxes that were the mainstay of IBM's CODE/400. If your shop's programming staff still uses SEU, you need to evaluate the advantages of using SEU over some of these GUI-based tools.

In OS/400 V5R1 and later, Eclipse is shipped with WebSphere Development Studio. So you don't need to download it. Fixes and the latest release are, of course, available from www.eclipse.org. Remember, this is the direction IBM is moving with development tools, so either you're in or you're out.
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