System iNetwork

The people who are making negative comments about the 5250 interface often have nearly no experience with it. Those who use it every day would have a hard time giving it up. Moreover, when they call for help, or need an enhancement, they're often pleased about how quickly functional enhancements are deployed.

Those who are more accustomed to GUI interfaces learn to deal with instability, poor support, and deployment delays.

Last year my daughter, a college student got a job as a teller at a bank. When she attended training, the instructor gave her the option of learning the "green screen" interface or the GUI, but highly recommended the green screen, saying that nobody ever chose the GUI for transaction processing, given the option. When she received her branch assignment, she found out that the trainer was right. Nobody used the GUI in a production environment.

The sad thing about prejudiced and ignorant comments like the ones reference in the original post, is that the iSeries indeed supports both HTML, and green screen, and is the most advanced server technology on the planet.

The iSeries is indeed a great machine. We use one for RPG and the database and another to host Websphere. We have realized large savings and increased revenue by moving customer service from call centers to the web. 5250 doesn't cut it for that. Refusing to learn new technology is just another way of saying, "I don't need a job".

"...For the third comment I have mixed feelings. It is good that there is a core of iSeries loyalists who can champion this amazing machine (why isn't IBM using them to spread the word?), but I wonder if they themselves are still stuck in the past, developing green-screen applications that people are now uncomfortable working with. Did they champion class leading, modern applications or deliver just another 5250 application. ..."

great post but I dont think this sentiment is fair to as400 programmers. IBM management has made it technically impossible to transition 5250 green screen applications to GUI.

First, the interactive subsystem on the as400 does not allow threads. Which makes it very difficult for an interactive program to manage two or more windows at the same time - one being the 5250 display, the others being popup windows spawned from the green screen application.

Also, the 5250 data stream is very limited in terms of working with an event driven GUI window. So, if you are trying to transition the green screen application to GUI by having, for example, a green screen menu option spawn a GUI property page, it is just about impossible to keep the two windows in sync.

IBM management has to replace the technical decision makers on the as400 with people who will make do with the resources available to technically improve the system.

-Steve

I must concur with Nathan. Our Parent company took our office off of a 5250 ERP system and moved us to SAP. The users hate it. It takes them twice as long to do their job because of the endless screens to travers to get to or enter the information they need. Some tasks that were automated in the old system are manual processes is SAP! A GUI interface is fine for personal productivity tasks on the PC, but ERP transaction processing is much more effecient on a text based system.
IBM has sold itself short by buying into the "GUI is Better!" line. I went to an IBM road show recently to see their product offerings. About half way through the presentation, the speakers talked about HATS (I think) to convert the "Ugh, 5250 Green screens" from "older legacy" systems to a "New, fresh interface". If IBM's own people are selling it that way, what can you expect from the general population.

Stepping on the soapbox now. Where to start? I feel the iseries is a great system because of extremely high reliability and low head count to keep it running. We run most everything on our iseries and have had wonderful success with it. The iseries has kept us competitive in our market place.

IBM will not market a box that will not offer many billions in added services (like the xseries,pseries,zseries).
The iseries is like a Maytag appliance, great product, maybe too great.

I am really sad at the way IBM markets the AS/400, am the IT manager of a bank that has 2 AS/400 servers model 720. I will tell u that the servers runs 24/7/365 without a hitch. I can count the endless headaches of some of my collegues in other banks that run on different platform has in keeping their servers up & running.

I have just done BTech in IT
and want to make my carrrer In IT industry

So I am doing some training program
on AS/400

Iwant to know that

Is The carrer in AS/400 field-- good?
And how is the salary raise after 2 or 3 years experience on AS/400

Why is the perception that the AS/400 is OLD? I think all you have to do is look at the ages of the people who develop on it. I'm 46, there are 2 people on our IT staff less that 40. Look at any web or MS solution development staff, probably not 1 person over 40.

Secondly, I think all AS/400 developers pride themselves in providing solutions that work and are low maintenance. From what I hear and have seen web and GUI applications are higher maintenance and have a slower development cycle. I believe we must learn new technologies so we can bring our considerable "common sense" to them. I've talked with alot of web developers that don't have a clue how to do something without complicating it.

So as far as loyalty is concerned, I'm very loyal to the iSeries because I believe in what I see it deliver on a daily basis. But I'm also loyal to REALITY, that once you are perceived OLD you must reinvent yourself as something new. Basically, the new technologies are available on the iSeries the developers must reinvent themselves.

as/400 is very powerful matrket in present
scenario.

The perception of the AS/400 as dated technology is, as we all know, absurd. We can rattle off all of the leading edge advantages like dual core 64 bit chips, abstraction of the machine interface, DB in the MI layer, single level storage, etc. But, perception is reality to the market. This widespread mis-perception in the business community at large presents solid backing for IBM's decision to rename the platform once again. I use the platform for a mix of J2EE Websphere and ILE RPG. Both of these environments are well supported on the platform. In our case we have shifted our Websphere Application Server installation to Intel servers, only because we could not convince our client to carve out a dedicated LPAR for Websphere, but I digress. Realizing that the state of the art in applications is a distribute object model, the i5 plays extremely well as a server. No it does not have a native GUI, but remember it is a server. My Websphere on Intel applications don't use a server GUI either, so I don't know what the issue on user interface is. The only time an i5 has a 5250 interface is when we build 5250 applications, which by the way, are great solutions for many transaction processing applications. The i5 supports J2EE with Websphere or Tom Cat, .NET using IBM provided ADO providers, collaboration with Lotus Domino, Portals with Websphere Portal Server and/or Workplace. If we can get the market to look past the fact that it has been around for awhile, it is easy to make the case that the i5 with its powerful underlying hypervisor supporting multiple guest operating systems, dual core chips, incredibly secure operating system kernel, etc. is the most advance business application server available today.