RPG PROGRAMMER PLAYING SOLITAIRE WITH JAVA If you're the sole RPG programmer in your shop who's interested in Java, rest assured, you're not alone in the world. Slowly, other die-hard RPGers are tinkering with the language, and one of them, Daniel Darnell, senior programmer/analyst for LSI Financial Group, has created a Java solitaire game in his effort to learn the object-oriented language. Darnell isn't into Web page design and, in fact, has aborted several attempts to learn C++. He has faced skepticism from upper management and plugged away at the language for a year and a half on his own. "I'm living proof that RPG programmers can transition to Java," he says. Bruce Bond, Gartner Group analyst, notes that continuing to write in RPG is not the wrong thing to do, but it's not the ideal thing, either. Bond firmly believes AS/400 shops need to keep their options open -- especially with enterprise applications -- and writing in Java is one way to do that. "RPG programmers may not be ready for Java," he notes. "But they had better get ready for it because IBM is pushing it big time -- and if they do write in Java it's going to give them tremendous flexibility moving forward." At the time Darnell started working with Java, he didn't have the big IBM push and massive industry attention to propel him toward the language. "After ten years of coding, RPG was getting pretty boring, but there was more to it than that," Darnell explains. "More and more I found that RPG wasn't quite adequate for the types of applications I was asked to write." Some of his advice for RPG programmers includes simply realizing that Java isn't necessarily "easy" to learn and that it's probably not going to come together for RPG programmers in 21 days. "You know those funny new suprocedure things in RPG IV? Learn them," he advises. "Learn them well. They're called methods in Java." He also recommends that RPG programmers learn how to use pointers in RPG IV because they're similar to the concept of "references" in Java. "If you can enter the Java learning process with the carry-over RPG IV features to your credit, then you can concentrate on the things that RPG doesn't have, namely the object-oriented constructs," he adds. Darnell is still taking it slowly and showing a lot of proof of concept code to his managers and gaining knowledge and experience. By the time the native Java compiler is available for the AS/400 (1Q98), he hopes to reap the benefits of shorter development cycles promised by reusable components and San Francisco frameworks. In the meantime, you can play around with Darnell's Java solitaire game. For additional information on Java, see news400.com's "Hot Java and Cool C/C++" pages. http://www.common.ch/AS4N970813.HTML