Editor's Note:
Another quarter has come and gone, and System i continues to have a poor showing in the revenue arena. A while back, I asked readers what they thought about the System i's lack of growth, and one conversation turned into a soapbox discussion about spinning contemporary-language applications on the System i. (If you have a topic you'd like to digress about, contact us at rsanders@pentontech.com [1].)

by Chris Hird
I have been developing and supporting code on the AS/400 and i5 since 1990. Yet I have never written a single line of RPG code and don't intend to. Does that mean I have no future with the i5? I hope not. I have written five products entirely in C with User Interface Manager (UIM) for the interface. Those products, though not top sellers, do work and work very efficiently.

Why do we have this RPG-only mentality in the i5 arena? Look at the job listings for the i5, check out the magazines, and see what the main programming language articles are about. I know we have been pushing the Java bandwagon trying to get the newer university graduates to view the i5 as a possible career choice, but I still don't see the level of applications developed using Java that there needs to be.

PHP is the latest addition to the languages supported on the i5. I must admit it isn't the cleanest of language installs, but it is manageable. As a website developer, I use PHP on many of the websites that I have developed, and I find it very easy to program. This is probably because of the syntax being loosely based on the C structure.

RPG has had its day. I understand that we have a very big install base of RPG applications that have to be maintained, but any new application should not be developed in RPG. How often do you hear of people migrating off the i5 platform to another platform running the same application? Is that because the platform is bad? I don't think so. It more likely has to do with the cost of the application and maintaining it. Developing an application in a language that has a smaller talent pool generally costs more, not only to build but also to maintain. RPG is not a widely taught language, so the talent pool is definitely smaller. Why does IBM spend so much developing a language that has no future outside of the i5 arena?

The C programming language has been around for a long time and is supported on most, if not all, platforms. That means the talent pool is a lot larger. If we need a programmer, it doesn't matter what platform he or she is developing on. The basics will be the same, with just a couple of nuances to come to grips with.

When I look at the other languages around, I see a lot of similarities to the C language, and with a bit of work I can program effectively in the other languages. I know C is not the answer to every problem, and that other languages are better suited to certain aspects of an application. That's why we have the ILE environment, which allows the developer to bring new modules into play written in any of the ILE languages, and RPG is one of those. However, I don't see why RPG should be the only language people associate with the i5.

I would prefer that the industry stop pushing the RPG message and look to the future. Let's bring the talent pool to the i5 by showing the positive aspects, such as not requiring a reboot every time you change the configuration.

IBM recently announced the new 515 and 525 boxes that really bring the cost of the hardware and software down, but unless we reduce the cost of development, we will never see the i5 rising to the top. We don't need RPG courses to be run at colleges or universities; the i5 supports other languages as well. Let's have those colleges and universities run courses for developing in other languages on the i5, showing just how easy it is to use Java, C, C++, and so forth.

Chris Hird [2] is president and owner of Shield Advanced Solutions. He first worked with the AS/400 at IBM Havant in the United Kingdom in 1989, responsible for setting up a support structure for a software product and its customers. He left IBM to set up Shield Software Services in 1993 and in 1997 moved to Canada and launched Shield Advanced Solutions, which provides tools and utilities aimed at supporting HA environments.