What Is RPG AS400?

What is RPG AS400 ?

Anyone who answered "report program generator" - good but not so good.
Yes that's what the letters stand for and yes that's what it started life as but that was long long ago.

A Very Short History of RPG AS400

Let me take you back to the heady days of the sixties when a computer had a large air conditioned room and had about a thousandth of the storage capacity of my cell phone! Of course there weren't any cell phones then nor any Internet, no email, no Google. What did we do for fun? I digress. Punched cards and paper tape were the fun ways to input data!
This is when RPG AS400 came into existence but that was then and things have moved on and yet we're still using RPG! How ? This is a great tribute to the way that IBM have moved the language forward. No longer is RPG AS400 the language of the cycle, it is now a fully structured free format language (when correctly used). I don't intend going into the details of RPG. If you want the details then I can recommend my bible - The Modern RPG IV by Robert Cozzi which is a great reference book and a great read. He shows the correct way to get the most out of RPG IV...

So what is RPG AS400?

It's the IBM programming language for the AS400, iSeries,Series i or whatever we want to call it. and it is capable of fully structured free format programming in the right hands . It can incorporate iSeries SQL. It has come a long way since the sixties and it has needed to !

But is it a language for the 2010s?

How does RPG AS400 address the internet? Has it moved on from the green screen? Is it really going anywhere or has it anywhere left to go? Well they said it was dead twenty years ago but it's still going strong and I guess as long as there's life in the Series i or whatever that morphs into then there will be life in RPG.
The AS400 is a solid backend business machine with a great database but even that is moving on.

One last thought.

Does anyone still learn RPG? "All the young dudes" are now writing web applications and designing websites and games (to which the name RPG has a totally different meaning) so is it just oldies that program in RPG and if that were the case, where would that leave RPG AS400 for the future ?....................

....................Click Here For Lots More Resources,Videos and News about RPG AS400