The move precedes a likely withdrawal of EGL CE but should enable an entirely new level of innovation around the more extensible Eclipse EGL Web Developer Tools.
Editor's Note: The following article is an edited version of the IBM DeveloperWorks EGL Blog titled, The open era for EGL begins today written by Will Smythe, IBM product manager for EGL, Rational Business Developer, and Rational Migration Extension.
The journey to transition IBM EGL to an open technology began in 2008 and has culminated in our announcement of the first, completely open source tool for building modern applications with EGL.
Eclipse EGL Web Developer Tools V0.7 provides many of the capabilities found today in our IBM EGL tools, but is built from the ground up on an open, extensible compiler and generator framework. This will enable an entirely new level of innovation—a level that has not been seen up to this point. We are excited to see where the technology goes, and are especially excited to see how the community evolves and contributes to the technology over the coming years.
Visit the all-new Eclipse EGL Development Tools (EDT) site to learn more about all the cool features and to download. If you have a question about any aspect of the project, or if you run into a problem, post it to the Eclipse EGL forum.
The tool we have announced is focused on simplifying the development of Web solutions. With this tool you can:
- Visually construct modern rich applications that run in all popular Web browsers, utilizing the Dojo toolkit and other standard HTML widgets
- Integrate with existing JSON and XML-based Web services
- Create Web services that perform business logic and interface with relational databases
- Test and debug end-to-end (browser to server) across the entire solution without needing to configure or deploy to a server
- Deploy to a local Java application server (like Apache Tomcat) and export as a standard Java Web archive (WAR)
For those familiar with IBM EGL Community Edition (the free tool IBM delivered in 2009), you will see many similarities. But, we have also contributed many of the great capabilities delivered in Rational Business Developer V8.0.1, as well as added completely new capabilities, like a new IDE Test Server that greatly simplifies and speeds up development and test of services all from within the IDE.
The EGL technology has come a long way over the last few years, and we are grateful for the continued support from our customer and partner community. We encourage all of you to explore the details of the open project and to download and try the new tools. Your feedback is important to us. I would encourage everyone to visit the EDT project site and read through the overview—it describes our view of EGL and why we believe it is such a valuable (and unique) technology.
A special thank you to the many good people that have worked so hard on and devoted so much of their lives to this technology (and its predecessors). The list of people that have contributed to this technology over the years is huge and the technology would not be what it is today without their efforts.
Replies to Special Blog Questions
EGL CE and Eclipse EGL Web Developer Tools (EWDT) are very similar, functionally. Both are designed to support Web app development (EGL-generated JavaScript for the front-end and EGL-generated Java for the back-end). EWDT, however, is open source, whereas CE was not (IBM did not provide the source for it). CE also does not include many of the features that were introduced in RBD V8 (e.g. grid layout). EWDT can also be extended much more easily by other vendors than CE. I definitely recommend that you use EWDT over CE at this point. In the near future, we will discontinue CE and point people to EWDT.
IBM did not contribute the EGL COBOL generator to Eclipse because it was not something we viewed as widely applicable as Java/JavaScript (to the general development community). It will continue just shipping in the IBM tools. Of course, plans can change. The good news (for a lot of reasons): because the EGL compiler and generator framework is open source, anybody (with the right skills) could build an RPG or COBOL generator.
In the very near future (possibly V0.8), support for calling RPG programs will be added to the Eclipse EWDT. This will enable IBM i shops to call existing RPG logic from an EGL service or Web UI. Of course, if you already have RPG (or COBOL) logic exposed as an XML or JSON service, you can drive this with the tools in V0.7 already.
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