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[SHARING] Moving from FOCUS to WebFocus
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Mike Garcia
Member
posted
We are new to WebFocus, but have a large community of FOCUS power users. As we start rolling out WebFocus many of them believe that they need to continue developing their reports using FocExecs. I am asking if anyone has encountered the same situation and has developed a very high level presentation that explains the paradigm shift. Something that can be emailed to the community to explain that the new way does not require FocExec expertise.

TIA

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kerry,


7.7*
AIX / P590
HTML
 
Posts: 2 | Registered: November 21, 2011Report This Post
Prarie
Virtuoso
posted Hide Post
As a long time FOCUS user before going to WebFocus - I still work mainly in the code. The Gui is great for HTML front ends and Graphs, but I'm afraid you are going to have a hard time getting folks to stop coding.

I'm sure others have Ideas to share....


In Focus since 1993. WebFOCUS 7.7.03 Win 2003
 
Posts: 1903 | Location: San Antonio | Registered: February 28, 2005Report This Post
George Patton
Master
posted Hide Post
Why would anyone want to stop coding? It's MUCH faster than using the GUI to lay down the basic structure. Then it's easy to open the report in the GUI to tweak the design. Opening the report in the GUI and then doing a save will also serve to correct some "bad" coding practices, such as not using fully-qualified field names (one of the things that used to work just fine in the past).


WebFOCUS 7.7.05 Windows, Linux, DB2, IBM Lotus Notes, Firebird, Lotus Symphony/OpenOffice. Outputs PDF, Excel 2007 (for OpenOffice integration), WP
 
Posts: 674 | Location: Guelph, Ontario, Canada ... In Focus since 1985 | Registered: September 28, 2010Report This Post
Mike Garcia
Member
posted Hide Post
Well, we are new to this and I think that the cost of providing DevStudio would make it more economic to have people use InfoAssist instead. Or can you use InfoAssist and still do coding?


7.7*
AIX / P590
HTML
 
Posts: 2 | Registered: November 21, 2011Report This Post
Brian Suter
Platinum Member
posted Hide Post
InfoAssist generates code. Also look into reporting objects where developers can configure (with some code) a much more robust starting point for the users. But it is still not the full code capability and if that is what your developers are used to ... they will not want to go to tool.

The much bigger shift is going from a continuous connected session to transaction orientation of the web. Basically, in continuous sessions you can prompt the user for some response in the middle a procedure and when the user hit enters, the procedure continues from the middle (CRTFORM). That is not the web paradigm.

You can write HTML pages that ask a set of questions - and those pages can use fexs to acquire information to present to the user (lists to pick from, etc.).

In the end you will have more focexecs that are considerably smaller which specific tasks. It makes the fexs much easier to document AND to reuse.


Brian Suter
VP WebFOCUS Product Development
 
Posts: 200 | Location: NYC | Registered: January 02, 2007Report This Post
Dan Satchell
Virtuoso
posted Hide Post
Your developers will essentially be moving from a 4th generation world to a 3rd generation world. Knowledge of TABLE, MODIFY, CRTFORM, some JCL, and a few operating system commands does not suffice in new world. Developers will need to learn HTML and JavaScript and how the WebFOCUS environment interacts with these presentation "scripts". The GUI tools can be helpful in some cases, but robust applications will require significant amounts of coding in the FOCUS language, WebFOCUS style sheets, graphing API, and JavaScript. Your developers won't be doing less coding, but more - and in programming paradigms that work much differently than what they have encountered in the mainframe world.


WebFOCUS 7.7.05
 
Posts: 1213 | Location: Seattle, Washington - USA | Registered: October 22, 2007Report This Post
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