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If you have a staff chock-full of object-oriented programmers, you should probably just use Java for your Web development. On the other hand, if your staff is more comfortable with Cobol or RPG, there's an alternative—IBM's Enterprise Generation Language.
By David F. Carr
A Technology Primer
IBM's Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) is a programming language that can be used to create Web 2.0 applications, mainframe or midrange computer applications with simple terminal interfaces, and applications that bridge the two worlds. It has a portability story akin to that of Java, combined with a programming model that is more procedural than object-oriented, giving it some of the straightforward virtues of Cobol as a language for writing business rules and procedures.
"It's like Cobol, but it's 40 years newer than Cobol," says Hayden Lindsey, vice president of enterprise tools and compilers for IBM. "We've declared it IBM's newest business language," he says, calling it "one of two languages IBM is investing heavily in" along with Java.
EGL is not new—variants have been kicking around IBM for years, embedded in tools such as Visual Age Generator and IBM Cross Platform Product—but the company has recently invested more effort in developing it into a full-blown, modern, and extensible language.
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In reality, EGL isn't a replacement for either Java or Cobol. As employed within IBM's Rational Business Developer (so far the only tool to support it), EGL is used to generate Java code for deployment to Web application servers or Cobal for mainframe and midrange computers.
The advantage of working in EGL, rather than writing to those languages and platforms directly, is that developers can concentrate on the business logic of the application rather than the peculiarities of the target platform. Rational Business Developer, which is based on the popular Eclipse open source development environment, also includes a visual design workbench that generates Java Server Faces code, and IBM is building in support for rich user interfaces that leverage popular JavaScript toolkits.
For a developer schooled in a language like Cobol or RPG (a language used primarily on IBM's System i servers), "it's a much easier transition to learn this language than to learn Java," says Eric Simone, founder of a consulting firm called ClearBlade that is promoting EGL. "And it's modern, with first class verbs in it like 'Service' for generating a Web service."
If you have a staff chock-full of object-oriented programmers, you should probably just use Java for your Web development, Lindsey says. On the other hand, if your staff is more comfortable with Cobol or RPG, EGL will let them start working on creating Web applications and Web services without necessarily mastering all the complexities of Java, JavaScript, and XML. EGL and Rational Business Developer are also accessible to developers who have built their resumes around rapid application development tools such as PowerBuilder and Visual Basic.
Some customers, such as the Belgian bank KBC, have successfully used EGL to create one application that can be compiled as either Java or Cobol, depending on the computing infrastructure available in the countries where it operates, Lindsey says. Others, such as the pharmacy benefit management firm Medco, are migrating applications created with other rapid application development tools to EGL, he says.
Next: Another Proprietary 4GL?
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