A comprehensive visual design tool that allows anyone to create great browser interfaces comes packaged with the new RPG handler.
Profound Logic has announced the release of Profound UI, a high-performance graphical user interface platform for the IBM i. This offering is made possible through a cooperative effort with IBM that recently announced the release of Open Access for RPG, which allows RPG’s native input and output operations to communicate with Web interfaces.
Profound UI is an RPG Open Access handler that allows users to create native IBM i objects to represent a rich graphical user interface and create connected applications that deliver rich user experiences regardless of project complexity or organization size.
Profound UI was specifically designed to be easy and natural for the typical business application developer to work with. IBM i developers no longer have to familiarize themselves with the low level complexities of Web 2.0 technologies, and there is no need to be an expert in JavaScript, AJAX, or DHTML.
Visual Designer and Rich Display Files
Packaged with Profound UI is a comprehensive visual design tool that allows anyone to create professional looking browser interfaces in a point and click manner. Using the visual designer, developers drag and drop components onto the user interface; then resize and edit the components’ content and appearance inline. Each component, also known as a widget, has hundreds of properties that can be modified visually. All widgets and their properties can be tied directly to fields using a concept similar to traditional display file fields and indicators. The end result is a native IBM i object, known as a Rich Display File.
This enables RPG programs to easily populate the user interface with server side data and control the appearance of the interface through server-side code. Rich Display Files take advantage of IBM i's object-based architecture, while delivering a capable graphical user interface. Similar to traditional display files, Rich Display Files are organized into separate record formats to represent different screens, window dialogs and/or subfile grids.
Profound UI Visual Designer
The platform ships with more than 125 types of cross-browser rich widgets already prepackaged with the designer. These include all of the most common graphical components business application developers require, including editable grids, dialogs, charts, tab panels, menus, date pickers, spinners, dropdowns, buttons, and more. In addition, the platform is extensible allowing web developers to create their own widgets or enhance existing ones using JavaScript API.
RPG Development with Profound UI
In the past, it may have taken years for an RPG programmer to become fully proficient in Web application development; but with Profound UI’s native approach, there is virtually no learning curve, making it an ideal platform for both modernization and new development projects.
“This is perhaps one of the most important IBM i-related announcements in the last decade,” says Alex Roytman, CEO of Profound Logic Software, Inc. “It’s the exact type of functionality IBM i developers have been asking for. Finally, developers can use native RPG operations to talk directly to rich browser interfaces.”
When working with Profound UI, RPG Developers write programs using the same top-down approach that they have always used. Instead of using proprietary API, Profound UI uses native RPG operations, such as Execute Format, Write, and Read. These operations, which are traditionally utilized for green-screen interfaces, are automatically understood by Profound UI and rendered into a capable rich user interface.
Profound UI ships with a backend server that will provide statefulness, call stack support, informative error handling, subfile processing, session handling, overlays, library lists, and virtually all other features that RPG programmers are already familiar with from traditional concepts.
Getting Started with Profound UI
Profound Logic is hosting a webinar, entitled “It has arrived! A Native GUI for RPG,” on Wednesday, April 21, at 1:00 p.m. EST. Those interested can learn more about the graphical user interface platform and sign up for the upcoming educational webinar at www.profoundui.com. Interested readers can also subscribe to the company's bi-weekly newsletter, iModernize, at www.profoundlogic.com and will be notified of new updates, including company events and product enhancements. For more information on Profound UI and its capabilities write
About Profound Logic Software, Inc.
Profound Logic Software, an Advanced IBM Business Partner, has a long history of innovation on IBM i. The company is well known for its developer productivity and modernization tools: RPG-Alive, RPGsp, Genie, Atrium, and iData.
Profound Logic Software was the first to introduce a hybrid compiler for RPG and HTML that allows IBM i shops to reuse existing skills and code for building Web applications. Profound Logic also launched the first Visual Debugger for RPG-based Web development. Over the years, the team at Profound Logic has developed a variety of green-screen conversion and modernization technologies and continues to refine these technologies to this day.
At a time when AJAX development was primarily done from scratch, Profound Logic created a cross-browser AJAX library for the IBM i. The library was later extended into the first browser-based Visual Designer for Web-enabling RPG applications.
This type of innovation has allowed Profound Logic to flourish, gain many prominent customers, and during the past 10 years, service thousands of customers and facilitate the modernization of many millions of lines of legacy RPG code.
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