We first talked about the new version of RDi back in April ("Back to the future with RSE"). Now that we've had a few days to play with it, we thought we'd give it a quick review.
The Big Changes
The most noticeable change is the new layout of the workbench. With V9, Rational have moved up to Eclipse version 4.2 (from 3.8) as the base for RDi, and it looks quite a bit different. We like the change, but if you prefer the old look you can still find it by using the "General -> Appearance preference" function. But while that will change the appearance of the workbench, it won't change the fact that it also behaves differently.
How different? For one thing, you can no longer right click on a tab and make it a fast view. The new equivalent action is to use the window's "minimize" button. Once you do that, the "fast view" shows up in a bar on the left or right side of the window, depending on which side the original window was. Click on the view's "individual" icon, and it will pop out similarly as a fast view did. While it is in this position, you can resize it to meet your personal preferences, and then park it again either by clicking the underlying window or by clicking the icon in the bar again. There is also a "restore" button for each window that can be used to return it to its regular position. The old "dock on" option has disappeared in this release, but if you don't like the default position in which the workbench parks your view, you can drag it to your preferred position (left, right, bottom, or top). Once we get used to this layout, we think we will prefer its simpler approach. But judging from the righteous indignation being expressed on Eclipse.org, we may be the only ones.
There are other similar changes in the interface, but none worthy of note--at least to-date. At this point, we wish we could highlight the many other wonderful features of this new release. But as we suspected, there don't seem to be any. The focus here was clearly on bug fixes and utilizing the new version of Eclipse.
Speed
Maybe it's just us, but we did notice an improvement in the speed with which lists appear in the RSE view. Downloading also seems a little faster, although the relatively new (8.5) dynamically populated Outline View is being built at the same time, unless you have turned the option off. That seems to slow down the download process for large source members, so there's no noticeable difference there between the speed with 8.5 and 9.0.
Data Studio
We just published an article on Data Studio in the e-newsletter, "Studying Data Studio," in anticipation of its integration into RDi. Sadly our hopes for complete integration were dashed. You have to download and install the product separately-a-t least, in the trial version we were using. If you opt to install it with the same package as RDi, then its facilities will be available in the workbench. That's about it. As far as we can see, there has been little or nothing done to address the lack of IBM i awareness in Data Studio, even though we installed the latest release (4.1). That said, as we noted in the article, it is still quite useful. It's just a little annoying to have it announced as being part of RDi, only to find no real difference compared to the free standing version that we downloaded and used before.
We hoped that the Web page, "Data Studio V4.1 features: by data server and component," would help us to understand what new features might be available, but many of the most useful new features such as the "Stored procedure editor and debugger" are marked as "Not supported when a connection is created by using only the IBM Toolbox for Java driver." To date, we have not been able to determine what drivers do support these features and how (and at what cost, if any) they can be obtained. This is the kind of thing that annoys us; is it so hard to provide a link to the requisite information? A web page annotation such as this is more frustrating than useful.
Adding Data Studio to our workbench seems to have caused the regular help system to fail. When we click F1 on an op-code, we are simply told that the topic does not exist. We'll report back when we find the fix for this.
IBM Worklight Studio V6.0
The announcements for RDi V9 included Worklight Studio, which is a new set of tooling for building mobile applications. We were really looking forward to playing with this. We've looked at a number of mobile app development tools recently and wanted to see how IBM's new offering compared; two problems have sadly prevented us from doing this. First, it is not included in the RDi download. We're assuming that you have to download it and install it separately as we did with Data Studio. Perhaps more importantly, as far as we can tell, the server component is not supported on IBM i at all, which really makes us wonder why RDi bothered to include it at all. Sometimes IBM moves in mysterious ways.
Nice idea, but …
We were interested to see that IBM have developed an ROI calculator to help you prove to the boss that RDi is a good investment. You have to supply your own ideas regarding how much productivity gain you can expect to get for the various tasks (analysis, editing, compile, debug, etc.), but we found the numbers suggested to be, if anything, a little conservative. So the exercise was interesting.
However, one of the figures used in the subsequent calculation that you seem to have no control over is $20,000 per year in "support staff." What? Who has a support staff for RDi? For that matter, who has a support staff for almost any other software product in the IBM i world? IBM saying that it will cost $20,000/year for support would be reason enough not to deploy it for almost every shop we know of! Amazingly, the figures still do show a real cost benefit to installing RDi--just imagine the ROI if we could remove the mysterious "support staff" cost.
The Big Changes
The most noticeable change is the new layout of the workbench. With V9, Rational have moved up to Eclipse version 4.2 (from 3.8) as the base for RDi, and it looks quite a bit different. We like the change, but if you prefer the old look you can still find it by using the "General -> Appearance preference" function. But while that will change the appearance of the workbench, it won't change the fact that it also behaves differently.
How different? For one thing, you can no longer right click on a tab and make it a fast view. The new equivalent action is to use the window's "minimize" button. Once you do that, the "fast view" shows up in a bar on the left or right side of the window, depending on which side the original window was. Click on the view's "individual" icon, and it will pop out similarly as a fast view did. While it is in this position, you can resize it to meet your personal preferences, and then park it again either by clicking the underlying window or by clicking the icon in the bar again. There is also a "restore" button for each window that can be used to return it to its regular position. The old "dock on" option has disappeared in this release, but if you don't like the default position in which the workbench parks your view, you can drag it to your preferred position (left, right, bottom, or top). Once we get used to this layout, we think we will prefer its simpler approach. But judging from the righteous indignation being expressed on Eclipse.org, we may be the only ones.
There are other similar changes in the interface, but none worthy of note--at least to-date. At this point, we wish we could highlight the many other wonderful features of this new release. But as we suspected, there don't seem to be any. The focus here was clearly on bug fixes and utilizing the new version of Eclipse.
Speed
Maybe it's just us, but we did notice an improvement in the speed with which lists appear in the RSE view. Downloading also seems a little faster, although the relatively new (8.5) dynamically populated Outline View is being built at the same time, unless you have turned the option off. That seems to slow down the download process for large source members, so there's no noticeable difference there between the speed with 8.5 and 9.0.
Data Studio
We just published an article on Data Studio in the e-newsletter, "Studying Data Studio," in anticipation of its integration into RDi. Sadly our hopes for complete integration were dashed. You have to download and install the product separately-a-t least, in the trial version we were using. If you opt to install it with the same package as RDi, then its facilities will be available in the workbench. That's about it. As far as we can see, there has been little or nothing done to address the lack of IBM i awareness in Data Studio, even though we installed the latest release (4.1). That said, as we noted in the article, it is still quite useful. It's just a little annoying to have it announced as being part of RDi, only to find no real difference compared to the free standing version that we downloaded and used before.
We hoped that the Web page, "Data Studio V4.1 features: by data server and component," would help us to understand what new features might be available, but many of the most useful new features such as the "Stored procedure editor and debugger" are marked as "Not supported when a connection is created by using only the IBM Toolbox for Java driver." To date, we have not been able to determine what drivers do support these features and how (and at what cost, if any) they can be obtained. This is the kind of thing that annoys us; is it so hard to provide a link to the requisite information? A web page annotation such as this is more frustrating than useful.
Adding Data Studio to our workbench seems to have caused the regular help system to fail. When we click F1 on an op-code, we are simply told that the topic does not exist. We'll report back when we find the fix for this.
IBM Worklight Studio V6.0
The announcements for RDi V9 included Worklight Studio, which is a new set of tooling for building mobile applications. We were really looking forward to playing with this. We've looked at a number of mobile app development tools recently and wanted to see how IBM's new offering compared; two problems have sadly prevented us from doing this. First, it is not included in the RDi download. We're assuming that you have to download it and install it separately as we did with Data Studio. Perhaps more importantly, as far as we can tell, the server component is not supported on IBM i at all, which really makes us wonder why RDi bothered to include it at all. Sometimes IBM moves in mysterious ways.
Nice idea, but …
We were interested to see that IBM have developed an ROI calculator to help you prove to the boss that RDi is a good investment. You have to supply your own ideas regarding how much productivity gain you can expect to get for the various tasks (analysis, editing, compile, debug, etc.), but we found the numbers suggested to be, if anything, a little conservative. So the exercise was interesting.
However, one of the figures used in the subsequent calculation that you seem to have no control over is $20,000 per year in "support staff." What? Who has a support staff for RDi? For that matter, who has a support staff for almost any other software product in the IBM i world? IBM saying that it will cost $20,000/year for support would be reason enough not to deploy it for almost every shop we know of! Amazingly, the figures still do show a real cost benefit to installing RDi--just imagine the ROI if we could remove the mysterious "support staff" cost.
Jon,
Thank you very much for the preview.
I appreciate your support in educating everyone about the product.
Here are some points that you may or may not have been aware of, in response to some of the things I read.
It is not just your imagination, the performance of the dynamic outline should be faster. I have put in an enhancement so that the cached information about an IBM i file is reusable, by any other RPG construct that references the same name. It is also cached across members. In previous releases, the information was tied to the specific F or D spec that referenced the file, and if that spec was changed or move, dynamic outline would need to be refreshed to re-extract the file information from the host.
The other thing that should really help the performance is the reduced memory footprint of the outline view.
You are right that a lot of effort was spent on improving the accuracy of the outline view which now handles a lot more RPG. Along the way I did put in some features that people should find helpful.
The ability to now use the back/forward toolbar arrows (Alt-Left, Alt-Right) to move WITHIN the member and not just between them is a beauty. So when you hyperlink to a definition, you just use Alt-Left to go back. Or you can quickly arrow back and forth between all the places you have changed in the current member.
Also the hover for procedure calls, now shows all of the parameters and their types to help you code them.
I tried hitting F1 on an opcode in fixed form and free form RPG with a shell share of Data Studio and it worked fine. Feel free to open a PMR as it must be something unique with your setup.
It is true that Worklight server is not yet supported on IBM i. But it is still possible to target IBM i applications with Worklight and have the server run on a web server on a different box.
Thanks again for being such a positive force in the community.
Posted by: Edmund Reinhardt | June 26, 2013 at 03:08 PM
Jon/Susan,
Since your article on Data Studio last week, I downloaded it and started playing. I found that a few optional driver properties let you set up a library list and point to an iASP, if you need one. Although different (especially in the stored procedure implementation) from iNav, most everything works better than the opsNav sql script runner implementation. From what I can see, it can be a useful replacement for opsNav, script navigator and green-screen iSQL, though the learning curve will be higher for those not yet using eclipse-RDI/P.
Thanks again for the great articles.
Posted by: Art Blose | June 26, 2013 at 04:55 PM
Dr Dobbs web site has an article about RDi v9 too http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/ibm-tools-up-rational-developer-for-i/240157353
Posted by: Greg | June 28, 2013 at 12:42 AM