last updated at 27 Jun, 2006 00:32 (1 times)
Great article Howard. I'm just turning some scripting & programming friends of mine onto REXX & will send them to your article. They are (rightly so) already impressed with what REXX can and can do
- and the ease at which it can do it. Combined with the fact that it runs on just about anything makes it quite an elegant solution for numerous tasks. As for REXX on Warp/eCS, they are of course flummoxed by what it can do, as well as how many apps and utilities make use of REXX to handle much of their work and interaction with the WPS. Usually, once they see what the WPS can do alone, they are amazed. Then once I show them how easy it is with just a few lines of code to enhance, extend and/or control the WPS, they are flabbergasted. Then moving on to various WPS utilities and add-ons by others that use REXX, they just stare, wide-mouthed and wide-eyed.
Personally, I use REXX for a lot of things, from WPS manipulation to server scripting (web, ftp, email, etc). Showing my friends & collegues how REXX can handle web cgi stuff amazes them, especially the ease of data handling and the fact that I very often have my scripts dynamically modify themselves based on what they are doing, what input the scripts are sent, and what results are generated by those scripts or from database calls. I've got friends who swore by Perl who are beginning to wonder why they wasted the time learning it.
And of course, the beauty is, you can start programming in REXX in the first 5 minutes of use with any experience in any other language. And then you find that making more complicated programs - well, isnt more complicated at all.
Thanks for the great article,
-Robert