WMCPA – what an interesting week…

This past week I attended the WMCPA conference in Wisconsin.  Conference attendance is down everywhere it seems but that didn’t deter the spirit at the conference where the midwest personality was let live.  Upon picking up my bags I was greeted by Debbie Clemons (a RPG tech college student of Jim Buck’s) and as I put out my hand to be shook it was completely ignored and instead a hug took place – gotta love midwest people :-)

The conference has a couple of things happen that I wanted to comment on.  The first is some interesting news that was stated by none other than Frank Soltis (recently retired cheif scientist of the IBM i) about a new IBM language named X10 and an OS/Hardware platform that is highly integrated with the programming space.  Here are the links where you can read more about it.

X10

PERCS

I was actually on a roundtable discussion panel with Frank – me, little ol Aaron Bartell, on the same stage as Frank!  Needless to say I was a little giddy though I did my best to hide it.  One of the other people on the panel was none other than Joe Pluta :-)  We made sure to keep things at a calm breeze and no fights errupted though we did disagree on a number of points, but in the same breath we also found common ground as we discussed the past, current and future of application development on the IBM i.  It was a fun round table and I am not one to shy a way from giving an opinion :-)

On the last day of the conference Alison Buteril (whom I respect) was giving another key note speach to the entire attendee roster about application development across all the different IBM operating systems, languages and development environments.  As always there were things I completely agreed with and areas where I was either in-different or just didn’t agree with the IBM mantra, but then towards the end this statement left her lips: “RPG cannot talk to the browser”.  I am not sure what happened to me right then and there, could have been an unexpected bowel movement – I don’t know, but I immediately interrupted her and made my point that her statement was in fact COMPLETELY false.  Of *course* RPG can talk to the browser.  Now, it may not be near as easy to get a first application up and running as it is with EGL or PHP or .NET, but it most definitely CAN talk to the browser and IMO is a better long term solution that will *save* time because of the RPG environments lack of complexity (in comparison to the other environment programming stacks as a whole).  In fact, there are a number of vendors who make their living by providing frameworks on top of RPG and IBM’s CGI API’s to facilitate RPG talking to the browser.  If you are wondering who, here is a short list:

CNXCorp’s Valence

Profound Logics RPGsp

Icebreak

BVSTools’ eRPGSDK

ProData’s RSP

Renaissance

and last, but not least, a framework built by IBM: CGIDEV2

I am working on getting Alison’s email right now so I can ask further questions as I would like to know why that statement was made to a group of people who’s livelihood is RPG.

Thoughts?