I'm an IBMi Developer - do I choose SEU, RSE or WDSC?

If your caught between using SEU (Stoneage Editting Utility) and RSE (Really Stupidly Expensive) for your IBM-i code development environment - you have one other glaringly obvious choice - WDSC (Wonderful Double Super Codetool).

Personally, I like WDSC because its $FREE. This was the last iteration of the Websphere Development suite before IBM, rebuilt and rebranded it as the 'Rational Developer Tool' and decided to charge $900 per copy. For Freelance RPG Programmers like me that just puts the tool completely out of my budget. I pay one third of that for a license for every piece of Microsoft Software out there... but enough of my gripes about IBM's ridiculous software costs for us freelancers.

WDSC is a terrific graphical Coding Tool for the IBMi - Best in class of the 'free as400 coding' tools. For editing RPG and/or CL its a no brainer. Clean screen editing and a whole bunch of very cool tools that simply blow the old SEU environment out of the water.

"But what about the old SDA warhorse" I hear you ask.

Perhaps some of you are even, secretly, using RLU for your printer file layouts. (RLU gets a bad rap imho - I kinnd of like it, but thats another story completely)

SDA/RLU with WDSC 7 SDA is very easy to use with WDSC, once you have found out how to get it running: The WDSC-SDA component is called 'CODE Designer' and is included on one of the CDs distributed with WDSC 7.0. However, it's not installed by the WDSC installer. I dont know why its not installed by default - IBM are a bit crazy like that.

After WDSC is installed, you have to put the CODE CD into the drive and run the install program for that CD. WDSC 7.0 includes CODE and it works just fine on Win XP, Vista and Win7 (as I have it running on all three versions)

WebSphere Development Tools for the IBMi is Very Very Very Cool!

I've just installed WDSC7.0 for the first time (/me ducks from the barrage of rotten fruit launched at him from the rowdy-RDi-crowd) and have almost had a religious experience with it.

For years I've been feverishly hammering away in S.E.U. and P.D.M. mistakenly thinking that I just haven't got the time to learn a new G.U.I for writing RPG and CL programs on the IBMi.

Look at that - I used WDSC, RDi, SEU, PDM, GUI and IBMi all in the same paragraph ;) but at least I never used the word leverage or any other business junk phrases like lets run that idea up the flagpole and see who salutes