COMMON Belgium - February 7, 2007
Application modernization without complexity

Morning session
- How to overcome complexity for System i bus iness applications?
Speaker: Jean Mikhaleff.
Jean Mikhaleff has a DESCF (Diplôme Etudes Comptables et Financières) from Yvelines and an Informatics degree from IUT, Paris. Jean founded REPEGLIO in 1998 and he is the author of a RPGIV generator, REPEGLIO, and its lighter version, FastRPG, for the System i. This generator is available in French as well as English. Prior to this, Jean worked for about 10 years as technical manager for the independent software vendor, Cap Gemini. There he managed some big business projects for laboratories, finance and industry mainly on S38 and AS/400. Complexity is a real plague nowadays. How to manage this complexity? By cutting out applications into components and by following programming standard rules? Jean proposes to share with you his huge programming experience in order to overcome all the dark faces of complexity.
9:00 - 9:30 Coffee and Welcome
9:30 to 10:50 - Part I : Programming standard rules and design :
Which programming rules? We know that if a transactional program meets the i5/OS screen design rules, it would be web compliant immediately with the standard rules of hundreds of IBM and non IBM re-facing tools. It is worth doing! Following IBM programming rules is not only necessary to maintain applications on long term by a team, but also to modernise them in a much easier fashion.
10:50 - 11:10 Coffee break
11:10 to 12:30 - Part II : ILE or cutting into components :
Which components? Good question. And why not use ILE components like IBM objects *module and *srvpgm with activation group? Even you don't want to use ILE architecture you must know the ILE principles to understand hundreds of IBM commands like the default parameter OVRSCOPE(*ACTGRPDFN) in the very popular IBM command OVRDBF. Not only you cannot get away from ILE but ILE can make your task much easier when cutting out some complex applications into components. It would be good to have an overview of ILE.

12:30 - 13:30 Lunch
Afternoon session - Native to jazzy User Interface for the System i
Speaker: Diane Piton.
Diane Piton has a postgraduate degree in Operating System, Software and Hardware Architecture & Engineering from the Pierre et Marie Curie University in Paris and she had also started her Ph.D. on Hypergraph Partitioning with a French national research grant. Diane now works for a software company dedicated to System i security and compliance. Prior to this, she worked for 10 years in a computer company specialized in banking, doing software development, developer training and management, systems and network architecture, IT consulting (iSeries) and database documentation. In parallel, she has also worked a year for an engineering school, coaching students and controlling their jobs.
13:30 to 14:50 - Part I - User Interface - what is available
Our users judge us by the user interface. It is "The programme" for them. Diane will summarize the graphical user interfaces available today on the System I and would present the "native interface" in the end. This information is essential to show how easily we can win our users by doing something so called "modern" - which many a times simply means "no green screen".
14:50 - 15:10 Coffee break
15:10 to 16:30 - Part II - Going to XML for user interface
The user interface is based on its codified description. Diane will compare DDS to XML and show that XML is not for Java or for web services alone. XML is very easy to use. It is near to what we do today and using it can be a first step to modernize our System i applications.