Tooling
A fundamental consideration is that ANY developer should be able to participate and the resulting product should be maintainable with standard IBM products. Therefor there are no non-IBM tools that are pre-requisites to participate in the development.
It is however important that all members that consider contributing to this initiative, have access to the latest, best tooling and that their skills are current with regards to ILE and RPG IV (free) (or ANY other ILE language). FREE education is available to all developers in adopting the coding and design paradigm we have established as our core standards.
Maximum productivity will be possible if participants use RDi, which we STRONGLY suggest. However, in the event that participants do not have access to RDi, Mihael Schmidt has kindly made his MiWorkplace tooling available for FREE to contributors. Once you have downloaded his product, simply send him an email from his website (link below), indicating your involvement with intERPrise, and he will provide you with a software key.
The following tools and technologies are used by our team:
- AO Foundation
- RDi
- ILE-RPG Education resources
- Standard IBM i development tooling (compilers, ADTS, etc.)
- MiWorkplace tooling
- iWebSrv for INITIAL “delivery channel”
This group are keen for contributions and collaboration to render the User Interface (UI) and/or integration with microservices and web services (in intERPrise terminology we will refer to all the components for human interaction or external systems as “delivery channel”). We have already done significant architecture and integration work with iWebSrv and believe this work will set an excellent standard of what is to be expected from any technology. For more information, please see “Links” and “News & Other Resources”.
The objective is to ONLY use MODERN coding techniques. Our definition of when you are using ILE and RPG IV the way it should be, it will have most of the following attributes:
- *SRVPGM - Functions and Procedures bound into *SRVPGM and *PGM
- Activation Groups - NO execution in the DEFAULT (at least QILE named activation group) activation group (in general, bar exceptions)
- BIF’s
- Single Instance, reusable code components
- Separation of concerns (aka MVC, aka “multi-tier” architecture)
ILE C and ILE Cobol contributions are welcome, but MUST implement single Instance, reusable code components.
