EGL Free: More Data, Tool Expected This Summer
July 13, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Will Smythe, the product line manager for the Rational Business Developer and EGL development tools at IBM, has updated the FAQ about the forthcoming EGL Free tool that our Four Hundred Stuff newsletter told you about a few weeks ago in great detail. EGL Free, if you didn’t catch that story, is a free, unsupported version of IBM’s EGL development tools that ride atop the open source Eclipse integrated development environment (or IDE’s that support the Eclipse framework). According to the updated FAQ, EGL Free will require a few hundred megabytes of disk space and 1 GB of memory to run, and it will only run on Windows XP or Windows Vista desktop operating systems. Customers will have to download and install their own Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to use the tool, which is ironic given that EGL is itself an alternative to coding applications in Java. The open source Apache Tomcat 6.0 Web application server will be the only Web application server supported at first, but WebSphere Community Edition is a possibility. (Some kind of WebSphere would seem to be a necessity, particularly for Power System i shops that may not be familiar with or want any experience with Tomcat, but the FAQ says that support for WebSphere Application Server will only come with the EGL tools bundled into the Rational Developer toolset for mainframes and i platforms.) IBM plans to support DB2 (including DB2 Express-C) as databases, and any database that supports JDBC links “will probably work,” according to the FAQ. When the EGL Free tool is released later this summer, Smythe will put out a list of supported databases, and hopefully, DB2 for i will be one of them. Considering that some 60 percent of the shops monkeying around with EGL are doing so on an i platform, this stands to reason. If you want to be notified when EGL Free starts shipping, you can sign up here. RELATED STORIES IBM to Offer Free EGL Tool for Web 2.0 IBM Gives RPG Devotees Their Own Café IBM Adds ‘Rich UI’ Design Tool to Rational Business Developer IBM Unveils Change Management Software for System i IBM’s EGL Gets an Online User Group IBM Updates i Rational Tools, and HATS Too WDSC Is Out, Rational Developer for System i Is In IBM Opens Up the EGL Cafe, But Will People Stop By? EGL: The Future of Programming for the System i? EGL: At Least It’s Not Java, But It Ain’t RPG, Either
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