RPG and Programming

It has been a long time since my last post. My blog has obviously not been the biggest blip on my radar, but things keep happening, and I say, “I ought to write about that.” So here goes:

The biggest thing was my attempt to write a system to handle financial transactions using sockets over the Internet. RPG was not the language finally chosen; you can do sockets programming in RPG, but much of the problem involved continuing to handle processing while we did nightly batch processing and system saves.

The language I finally chose was Object Pascal. Not a bad choice, but it finally became apparent that I was much too used to doing file processing in RPG; sometimes you have to jump through hoops in other languages that you take for granted in RPG.

The project itself contains extremely intricate data processing. After a while (over a year) of hammering at it, and having a few minor successes and many major roadblocks, I finally threw in the towel. I suggested using ASNA’s visual RPG, but it seems that the process is being passed off to another programmer more familiar with network programming. I continue to believe that the process could done more cleanly by buying a package, but for some reason there is an aversion at our company to that - they prefer home-grown. At any rate, I am glad it is out of my hands. I never felt more inadequate as a programmer than when I was trying to make this process work. I was willing to keep on trying, but I would not have been able to make any promise as to when it would be done.

As always, I promise to try to write more. Hopefully, this will break the ice.