midrange.com - In My Humble Opinion

I went to witness the April 21 hearing in the SCO vs. IBM case. It was a fascinating and enlightening experience. I had never been to court before and it was much different than I had imagined.

First let me tell you a bit about me and why I went to see the case. My name is James Rich. I work for a two-man company as a consultant and programmer. I started using UNIX in January 1994 and GNU/Linux in mid-1995. Besides my work on the iSeries I use linux exclusively. I am not a lawyer and have no law training. But I am quite familiar with UNIX history and Linux history. I have also been following the SCO vs. IBM case as much as a lay person can.

My main motivation to attend the hearing was spurred by recent comments made by SCO's CEO Darl McBride disparaging Pamela Jones of Groklaw. McBride questions Ms. Jones' true identity and the motivations behind her site. Knowing that Groklaw is primarily a repository of legal filings made in the case and an explanation of what they mean, I was upset at Mr. McBride's accusations. Since I live in Salt Lake City I decided I should attend the hearing to decide for myself who was telling the truth.

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Another interesting thread on the rpg400-l mailing list and (hopefully!) another interesting article. What began as a simple question of where new RPG programmer talent would come from turned into a discussion of the iSeries position in the marketplace. The thread can be viewed here with a follow up thread here. The point made in this post by Terry Beeson is that, "AS400s tend to get a slating from Windows/Unix lovers, mainly because they don't understand what AS400s can bring to the party. The general perception seems to be that the AS400 is old and outdated." I think that Terry is right, the general perception is that the iSeries is old and outdated. What is important to understand is why.

I believe it is reasonable to say that a particular system's abilities are often judged by outsiders by how that system fares in big, spectacular deployments. Nothing says spectacular like supercomputers do. The current list of the top 500 supercomputers shows a number of systems from IBM, but none that run OS/400. It appears that the vast majority run an operating system that is either UNIX or UNIX-like. Thus it is only natural for someone to believe that their UNIX system can do anything a business would need - after all, it runs the most powerful computers in the world! Manufacturers know this and use it to their advantage. Is it any surprise then that people unfamiliar with the iSeries would think it is "old and outdated?"

Let's look at another example. In a post by Lim Hock-Chai he writes, "People ... think RPG is old or out dated because it can only produce a green screen (which is true unless you are using VRPG). User[s] are not going to care whether the application is written in RPG, VB, C, C++, Java or whatever. All they know is [that] green screen is old." Certainly RPG can do more than green screen 5250 applications (CGI being an important example), but the point that users' perception of the iSeries is molded by the 5250 green screen is a valid one. My last article very briefly discusses an idea to enhance the 5250 green screen experience. I don't think that the iSeries needs a GUI to enhance the users' interaction with it, but doubtless there is room to improve the green screen. With the current rather staid look and feel of the green screen it is no wonder the iSeries is viewed as old and outdated.

Another example is taken from my own experience. When I first started working with the AS/400 and RPG I had just come from the university where really interesting things were going on. The World Wide Web was getting started, Mosaic was popular, and computer 3D modeling was really coming into its own. All of these things required (at that time) a UNIX machine and the C programming language. When I was sat down at the AS/400 and instructed to start creating DDS for database files I felt that this was an antiquated system that didn't do anything interesting. My co-worker told me, "We don't do rocket science here." Knowing that we didn't do rocket science (or anything else exciting) and that we wouldn't be doing so in the future only cemented the antiquated perception of the AS/400.

So what can be done? Certainly there is nothing we can do about the top 500 supercomputer list. But while that is a very visible way to show a system's capabilities (at least as they relate to supercomputer tasks), it probably isn't necessary. As James Lampert suggests in this post we need to work with the iSeries strengths and make those known to outsiders. Before we can improve the perception of the iSeries, we need to understand why that perception exists.

An interesting thread has received a lot of attention recently on the rpg400-l list with the subject "RPGIII to get a facelift?" (see here to browse it in the archives). Among the many posts in this thread is one by Scott Klement that makes the point that in order to get people to move from RPG III (or even RPG II!) to RPG IV IBM needs to provide user visible features that are only accessible with RPG IV. The users referred to here are not programmers or managers, but data entry people or other non-techie types. Scott gives a few examples such as graphics capabilities or XML features. While true, this idea is only half right. In order to get people to move to RPG IV features must be provided that are only feasible in RPG IV, as Scott suggests. However, it is up to the programmers and developers, not just IBM, to provide such features.

What is a programming language, anyway? More or less, it provides instructions and manipulates memory. What distinguishes one language from another is how it provides the syntax and methods for doing so. With RPG IV we have a language that has great flexibility to accomplish the two main things a language does as stated above: we have a number of ways to manipulate memory and a number of ways to provide instructions. In fact, the only thing we can't do is provide our own BIFs. And this is what IBM needs to change. We should be able to write:

%mybif(%trim(%myotherbif(myvar)))

This change needs to come from IBM.

But this isn't the kind of feature Scott was talking about. Nor is it the kind of thing that an end user is going to see. So where do these features come from? The answer is us. IBM's obligation is to provide the language with flexibility to accomplish the two tasks of providing instructions and manipulating memory. We are under obligation to do the rest.

Let's look at an example. Enhanced graphics is certainly something the users would see. As is HTML integration. Perhaps most interesting is the idea of combining both. Imagine a 5250 screen with embedded HTML in it. That HTML could be something as simple as a GIF or as complex as a web application. But my point is that the HTML could be directly imbedded in the 5250 data stream. 5250 emulators such as tn5250 could embed Gecko (the HTML renderer in Mozilla) directly into the emulator to handle such HTML streams. A special attribute in the 5250 data stream would indicate that data following it is HTML. Another special attribute (or maybe the same one) would indicate the end of the HTML stream. Then a simple EXFMT would send the combined 5250 and HTML data to the 5250 client and voila! a feature the user can easily see and benefit from.

What is required to make such a feature? First, a 5250 client that can handle such data. That is certainly doable by us, the developers. Many projects exist that embed Gecko. Most of those projects are not backed by some large company. It is certainly reasonable that the iSeries community of developers could add such capability to a 5250 emulator.

Second, we need to get the HTML data into the 5250 stream. IBM could do this and add it to DDS and EXFMT. But can only IBM do it? It seems reasonable that an independant developer could write a function that when called writes HTML data to the 5250 data stream as described. This may involve some serious MI coding and a lot of work. But it could be done. Package it up and make it available to everyone. Suddenly, RPG IV has something that users want that they can't get with RPG III.

This wouldn't be the first time that great innovations and improvements originated outside of the company that produced the platform. Much of the UNIX world exists because people outside of AT&T starting adding features they thought were useful. Indeed, without outside contribution UNIX would have probably ended up being a niche operating system forever forgotten in the research lab. But regular (though talented) folks got involved and today we have Sun Microsystems, Cisco, BSD (in all its many flavours), Linux, and Mac OS X.

Let's not wait for IBM (or anyone else) to do things for us. If we can reasonably do something ourselves then we should. There are many great features that users would want that require the new capabilities in RPG IV. Let's charge ahead and create them!