Re-Engineering RPG Legacy Applications

There are hundreds of thousands of AS/400s around the world that are running legacy applications -- applications that were developed early in the life of the AS/400 or for the System/36 or System/38 or even the System/3! Many of these applications are the backbone of your business. They manage your payables and receivables, run your payroll, balance your acco+I10unts, and provide the tools that you use to make important business decisions. Should they be updated to more current technology to take advantage of the powerful enhancements IBM has made to the AS/400, OS/400, and RPG? Many would say No without thinking through the implications of that decision. Putting your company's IT resources in a condition of stasis while technology moves on may be a costly business mistake. It is not only possible, but also profitable, to derive some of the benefits of new technology from within a legacy application. IBM's recent enhancements provide a means of immediately increasing application reliability and programmer productivity with relatively little effort, while building a firm basis for the future of your business. While the technology means new concepts to be learned and new programming skills to be acquired, very few of these new enhancements are so radically different that they fall outside the grasp of the average RPG programmer. This book is a tutorial aimed at showing programmers how to convert and re-engineer their applications by taking them through a re-engineering of a sample application -- step by step.