Profound Keeps Programmers and Power Users In the Green

Published: August 1, 2006

by Alex Woodie

They lurk in the shadows at companies of all sizes, separate from the rest of us, unwilling, or unable, to interact with computers the way God and Microsoft intended--with a mouse and a GUI. They're green screeners, and there's probably one in your shop right now. In recognition that some green screens will never go away, Profound Logic recently launched a new release of its RPGsp development environment that serves up either 5250 or HTML interfaces, but requires only one development effort.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to green screens, those utilitarian command-line interfaces that hearken back to the day when bandwidth and processing power was severely limited, and data, not graphics, was king.

On one hand, there's no denying that green screens are relics that are simply too restrictive to relate some types of information in the ways computer users have become accustomed. Training new users on a green screen is also an issue because the vast majority of the world's computer users have never used a command-line interface. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and in those cases, the best GUI will always outperform the best green screen.

On the other hand is the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" crowd. While some applications are absolutely ill-suited to a green-screen interface, there are others where a green-screen is the preferred mode of interaction. A well-trained green-screen user working with a so-called "heads-down" data entry application, such as a customer order program, will out-perform a similarly trained GUI user who's required to navigate a screen with a mouse. The CIO might call it progress, but transforming these highly tailored and efficient screens to GUIs can actually hurt productivity.

This was the situation faced by Profound Logic as it helped OS/400 shops modernize their RPG applications. Profound, which owes its very existence to making RPG source code and applications more colorful and intuitive, either through its RPG-Alive tool or its RPG Smart Pages (RPGsp) development environment, encountered first hand the chasm separating GUIs and green screens.

OS/400 shops using Profound's RPGsp tool to convert their green-screen RPG applications into Web-enabled applications were encountering an issue when it came to the interface. The very reason these companies were using RPGsp was to Web-enable their application screens. However, not all of the screens or programs were well-suited to being Web-enabled. This led to a situation where the companies had to separately maintain their new Web-enabled RPGsp programs and their traditional RPG programs.

"The driving factor is these customers have green screens that they're looking to modernize," says David Russo, Profound's director of sales and marketing. "It generally works well, and the only complaint they have is it creates separate code and objects that have to be maintained separately. They have power users that like the green screens, and they don't want to have two versions of the code."

Profound thought about the problem, and came up with a solution. "We decided why not keep the functionality, but make it dual-purpose, so that the application can detect if it's been called from a 5250 screen or a Web browser," Russo says.

So that's what the company did. Last week Profound announced this new functionality in RPGsp version 5.6.3, which has been shipping for over a month. The new capability is a free upgrade to current RPGsp customers. The company currently has about 300 customers, many of whom use the tool to convert existing green-screen RPG applications into Web-enabled applications, as opposed to developing new Web apps from scratch.

Alex Roytman, Profound's president, says this new feature in RPGsp works by detecting Apache Web server variables (RPGsp uses OS/400's Apache HTTP server to serve Web-inized screens). "If the variables are not present, it means you're not running in a browser, so it must be green screen," he says.

Regardless of the interface used, the back-end business logic remains the same, which simplifies new development and ongoing maintenance. "It's the same OS/400 object that either the browser or green screen goes to," Roytman says. "But at runtime, the program detects which environment I am in. That's detected on the fly."

Roytman expects the new feature will be warmly received by the RPGsp customers that are converting existing RPG applications to function on the Web, but who want to keep some green screens around. "They don't necessarily like to have separate versions of their application for the Web or for green screens," he says. "When they do convert to the Web, they don't want to get ride of greenscreens."

The approach used by Profound with RPGsp--in which converted applications are true Web applications, with HTML separate from the 5250 screens after they've been converted--also lends itself well to ongoing development in RPGsp. For example, developers can easily change the number of subfile records displayed on a Web screen, choosing to display up to 200 records at a time, compared to the traditional 10 to 15 that can be displayed in a green screen, the company says. RPGsp also lets developers spruce up their HTML screens with a full array of doodads like dynamic images, dropdown boxes, and checkboxes.

Green screens will be around as long as IBM's midrange server, but modern applications will be outfitted with "smart clients" that blend the best desktop control with the versatility of HTML. RPGsp 5.6.3 should help users make the move to HTML, while minimizing their chances of blowing it with a poorly crafted GUI. Users can keep those trusty (and productive) old green screens around for as long as necessary, without emptying the bank account.

Yesterday, Profound announced yet another enhancement to RPGsp: the addition of a CL to Web conversion tool. Because most OS/400 applications are a combination of RPG or other third-generation language code and IBM Control Language (CL), an accurate reproduction of these applications on the Web platform must take the CL into account.

Profound says any CL programs can now be converted to Web programs using the green screen to Web conversion tool included with the RPGsp package. The CL program will maintain its functionality, Profound says, and will have the ability to function as either an interactive green-screen CL program or a Web program, from one compiled object.

RPGsp 5.6.3 is available now. The development environment is available in several packages with prices ranging from nothing up to $20,000. For more information, visit www.profoundlogic.com.

RELATED STORIES

Profound Logic Fine Tunes Programming Tool with RPGsp 5.2

Saving RPG and the iSeries--Now Isn't That Profound?

Profound Logic Whips Up 'Dream Architecture' for RPG Programmers

Profound Logic Updates RPG Editor

Profound Logic Keeps Focus on Simplification with RPG Smart Pages

Profound Launches RPG-to-Web Conversion Tool for the Masses

Profound Logic Streamlines Development with RPGsp 3.0

Profound Logic Updates IDE for RPG-based Web Applications

Profound Logic Launches IDE for RPG-Based Web Development