WDSc Survivor

Five Brave RPG Programmers Move from PDM/SEU to WDSc

March 19, 2005

Just an update

Sorry is has been so long since I've blogged anything. The Spring is my busiest travel time. I'm always away on some KOA trip right when COMMON is taking place. I heard there was a nice comment about our WDSc work at KOA made to the IBMers in a session. Thanks!

If you've read Jim Collin's book "From Good to Great", Jim talks about the brutal facts. Brutal facts are those things that you have to face, no matter what because they are what they are.

The brutal facts from our survivor journey is two of the four programmers have made the journey and two have not. The last of the five switched roles and doesn't use WDSc much for iSeries development, but has played with plugs ins for PHP.

I never intended to "force", (a very strong word) the developers to use WDSc instead of PDM/SEU. The only way I'll get two of my programmers to convert is to remove PDM/SEU completely. There are many excuses why they don't use it, some of the excuses are legit and others are not, at least in my opinion. The brutal fact is, they don't use it for 100% of their development.

To me, though IBM has WDSc release 5.something.something out there, WDSc is still relatively new. They have come a long ways and talking to the folks with IBM development team, they are excited about what WDSc can do. I'm convinced WDSc is better than PDM/SEU and shops should at least consider giving it a try.

Our mixed environment hasn't proved detrimental to our development work outside of the time spent in conversations either talking it up or talking it down. Healthy dialog though is always a good think, even for programmers!

jef

Posted by at March 19, 2005 8:54 AM

Comments

Jeff,

I come from era of the punch card and sticking
silver bits of paper over the holes that have been mis-punched. I have done
the s34/36/38/400 road trip and am now faced with a whole new road(map). It
looks like you have started this adventure and I wish you all the best with
as it is extremely obvious that no other choice exists in our AS400 (sorry
I-Series) world. It is all a bit exciting really.

My first impression is that in the long term it is going to be awesome and a
far better product than VB 6 - I know that is an unfair comparison but I
have no idea of .net. The real point here is that a whole lot more has
changed than just the introduction of a new development tool (WDSC). The
methods, tools, application design and interfaces have all changed and been
made available to a great machine (The S38 - joke..). We should try our best
to embrace the new multi-coloured environment and use it to develop real
industrial strength applications that our users can benefit from - which if
you think about is what we have been doing for years. If we don't do this
then who will ? It won't be the graduates who will move on quickly to expand
their careers, it won't be overseas development who will produce something
but not related to the business and now it won't be the green screeners.

Why am I writing ? Well basically to give you encourgaement so will you
carry on the good work and don't get too disheartened by the loss of 50% of
the team and the many niggles of the new product. Within 2 years I believe
we will be developing software that has all the benefits outlined by George
Farr and his mates that also runs on a mega machine which was and is ahead
of its time (as outlined by Frank - who maybe slightly biased !!).

keep up the good work.

Tony

------------------------------------------

PS at this very early stage I can't see a great deal of benefit in the LPEX
editor commands that you run from the command line in the editor especially
as they seem to be too long and case sensitive. e.g. findText or expandAll
can take ages to type. The find has a short version not sure about anything
else. Just thought I'd mention that as you have a line to IBM and they may
want to highlight the benefits.

Posted by: Tony at March 29, 2005 3:53 PM

Jeff,

I went to the Mar 19 COMMON and "discovered" RSE and the enhanced WDSc environment. I took all the classes and labs I could. I presented this to my applications team and all were initially excited.

I want to commend you on taking this journey -- the BLOG has been very interesting to me and I am already experiencing the obstacles presented.

I am now looking for training & resources on moving my team into the WDSc. Do you have suggestions?

MikeN

Posted by: Mike Nelson at April 24, 2005 10:05 AM

Jeff,

I'm an independent contractor that sells iSeries development, mainly in RPG.

I Recently took the decision of adding WDSC to an empty spot of my brain, and so I bought the Joe Pluta's Step-By-Step book. However, at that time I 'mispelled' the name of the software and downloaded the Application Developer component (WSAD)instead, which is useless to be used with the book.

Unfortunately I don't have any iSeries myself so no free copy of the Websphere Development Studio Client for the iSeries software for me, so my question is: how can I get it for free??

Thanks in advance for any tip you could give me.

JC

Posted by: Juan Carlos Servat at May 2, 2005 11:35 PM

In The Wisdom of Crowds, journalist James Surowiecki explores the underlying implications of the idea that large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant. As I look back, large groups embraced new tools like POP (a S/36 paradigm shift), SEU/PDM (vs. S/38 Pgmr Menu), PCs, word processors, spreadsheets... Is there any indication that large groups are embracing WDSc?

Posted by: Ron Schmitz at May 27, 2005 2:50 PM

Juan, I'm in the same situation, I rent space on an AS400. The owner of this AS400 can pass on a copy of WDSC iSeries to you, it's part of the OS.

Posted by: Matt at August 8, 2005 6:00 AM

Jef,

It has been quite a while since you've posted an update here and yet I've seen some of your WDSc articles in the magazine.

Has this blog been abandonned?

Just curious.

Robert

Posted by: Robert at August 22, 2005 10:46 AM

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