Category:RPG

RPG, which stands for Report Program Generator, is an easy to learn and understand programming language that is well suited for developing business applications.

Programmers, coming to RPG from other programming environments, will still need to get some education to familiarize themselves with its capabilities, and how it functions.

There are four major versions of RPG currently in use... RPG II, RPG III, RPG 400, and RPG IV (sometimes referred to as ILE RPG). The latter has two distinctive flavours: the traditional column restricted language entry and the modern /Free alternative where most of the coding can be entered in a non-column restricted way.

RPG is available only on IBM Midrange platforms, this is because the technology has evolved over many years to leverage operating system resources. Actually, RPG was used on the IBM 1401, System/360, S/370 and follow-ons, as well as HP3000 [1]. It also ran on Wang, Sperry, Burroughs, and Digital PDP and VAX computers. While never immensely popular on non-IBM platforms, it did exist outside of IBM.

OS/400 contains extensive support for debugging and run-time identification of RPG code. There is a large established base of RPG code in production environments, usually performing heavy-lifting batch-oriented data tasks, or providing support for interactive ERP applications, either with native 5250 interface or with a GUI or Web Skin applied over the 5250 data stream.

RPG vs. other languages

Compared to other programming languages, RPG is especially strong in

• transactional processing;
• data base access, such as DB2;

The main perceived flaw with RPG is that it is not object oriented, nor does it contain direct support for GUI Graphical User Interface.

Although RPG from IBM is perceived as not having good GUI support, there are RPG Third Party offerings to fill that gap.

RPG vs. Java

A comparison between RPG and Java can be made so long as Java is used in a developer framework or one of the available application servers. Unlike Java, however RPG contains language-level features for common business tasks such as database access.

Objects and RPG

Although RPG is perceived as not being object-oriented, the 400 is composed entirely of objects that can be manipulated by RPG and other languages on the 400.

Many versions of RPG, for a long time, have had the capability of importing standardized blocks of code to do standard functions, such as via /COPY. Also several versions or RPG support CALL a sub-program, thus many aspects of object management are facilitated within RPG.

Other Resources

midrange.com

RPG400-L mailing list is for general discussion of RPG programming.

RPG Developer Network

They host all sorts of RPG support, discussion groups, downloads.

• Home Page http://www.rpgiv.com/
• RPG FAQ http://www.rpgiv.com/kb/index.html
• RPG IV Built in Functions http://www.rpgiv.com/kb/built-ins.html

Original Wikipedia

IBM Software Category http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:IBM_software

RPG Programming Language, such as RPG IV http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPG_programming_language