On 03.07.2024 07:20, Jon Perryman wrote:
On Sun, 30 Jun 2024 13:28:20 +0000, Seymour J Metz<[email protected]> wrote:
The landscape would be quite different were IBM to provide legacy streams,
port ooRexx to TSO and include BSF4ooRexx as part of z/OS.
On my PCs I've pretty much abandoned SAA Rexx.
Nothing motivates IBM to port OOREXX.
Helping customers to become more productive with their mainframe product?
It is a waste of IBM manpower because it was designed for UNIX with very
limited address environments and a small user community which means it's
usefulness is very limited.
No, it was *not* designed for Unix. It is available for Unix, Windows, Apple, and many more
operating systems.
By the way, the first operating system IBM released ooRexx was OS/2 Warp. IBM then made quite some
business by selling the Windows product named "Object REXX" as it allowed large customer sites to
migrate from OS/2 to Windows, becoming able to run their developed Rexx scripts from OS/2 on the new
Windows platform.
Object REXX/ooRexx has all address environments that have ever been written for Rexx as it offers
the REXX SAA interface, but in addition, a modern, object-oriented C++ API set in ooRexx starting
with version 4.0, which got a totally new kernel, developed by Rick McGuire. The availability of C++
APIs is one of the reasons why it has become quite easy to integrate ooRexx with any OO system. It
is also responsible for making it possible to implement Java interface and abstract classes in
ooRexx classes, implementing abstract Java methods in plain [oo]Rexx! :)
If you are interested in Rexx environment handlers for creating 2D graphics on Windows, Linux, and
Apple, get the latest Java bindings; it is included there. If you want to see a simple example of
Rexx commands that create 2D graphics (exploiting Java2D behind the curtain) that run unchanged on
Windows, Linux, and Apple, then click here:
<https://wi.wu.ac.at/rgf/rexx/misc/jdor_doc.tmp/jdor_doc.html>. You will see that thanks to the
developed JDOR Rexx command language, the Rexx program is intuitively understandable; you could
probably start immediately exploiting 2D in plain Rexx after looking at it.
E.g. It's certainly better than shell scripts but it hasn't replaced them. Then
comes the question about integration which I'm guessing doesn't include
automatic integration with SAP, PeopleSoft, various databases and much more.
Beg to differ here!
With the Java bindings, you can integrate ooRexx with any complex application system that offers
Java APIs, like SAP [1], PeopleSoft [2], and many more.
In other words, you can write ooRexx scripts that interact with everything that
gets offered via Java!
As a real-world example, the ooRexx Java bindings [3] come with OpenOffice/LibreOffice support that
exploits their Java APIs, making it a breeze for business administration students to create, change,
store, run the OpenOffice/LibreOffice word processor, spreadsheet module or the presentation module.
(BTW, you can use OpenOffice/LibreOffice to read and write Microsoft Office documents on any
operating system platform.)
This support is available out of the box for Windows, Linux, and Apple. You write one ooRexx script
on Windows and can run it unchanged on Linux or Apple, and vice versa. Unchanged, nota bene! You
write the ooRexx script once and run it everywhere, thanks to the Java bindings in this case!
z/OS REXX on the other hand automatically integrates into most available
environments.
Yes, because IBM created REXX and integrated it in z/OS.
The problem is that IBM has never improved the REXX language on the mainframe in the past decades,
not even to match TRL2 (The Rexx Language 2, as specified by Mike F. Cowlishaw, the father of IBM
REXX, and published in 1990, almost 35 years ago). Can you imagine a software language that has been
frozen in time for a specific (very important!) environment, ignoring the requests and suggestions
of its customers for decades?
Now, ooRexx being TRL2 (and much more) would improve the productivity that REXX allows in a
remarkable way. Hence, if offered on the mainframe, then it would allow for a huge jump to a modern
version of REXX, buying a lot of functionality and productivity for the customers.
---rony
[1] SAP Java Connector: <https://support.sap.com/en/product/connectors/jco.html>
[2] PeopleTools 8.52: PeopleSoft Component Interfaces:
<https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E25688_01/pt852pbr0/eng/psbooks/tcpi/chapter.htm?File=tcpi/htm/tcpi06.htm>
[3] OpenOffice Java Language Binding:
<https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/DevGuide/ProUNO/Java/Java_Language_Binding>
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