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Pacific Mainframe Community
An exchange of news and ideas by members of the Pacific mainframe community
Developing applications in REXX and CLISTs
Gary from SA has also asked for this topic to be opened. I suspect this may get some interesting responses - ranging from "Don't" through to the benefits of REXX over Clist or vice-versa.
Personally, I love REXX - it's quick, flexible and powerful - since moving to REXX from Clist I've never looked back. But use it for a production application? Hmmm
About Bruce
Bruce is the personification of the Pacific Mainframe Community. He has been around since the first system/360’s were commissioned and has seen it all through to the current zSeries. Bruce has worked with DOS and VSE, MVS and z/OS, JES2 and JES3, CICS and IMS/DC, IMS/DB and DB2, IDMS and Datacom, COBOL and PL/I, JCL and ISPF, CLIST and REXX, and so the list goes on. Bruce has an opinion on any mainframe-related subject. More often than not he has multiple opinions and they can be contradictory! Bruce is passionate about the mainframe platform and he wants you to share your thoughts with him. Welcome to Bruce’s Blog.
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Adrian said:
Horses for courses.
Rexx should be banned from main stream/high volume work.
But an absolute life saver for prodn support where we can't get any budget for buying high priced licences for specialist problem solving/monitoring tools. Love the interfaces to DB2 and MQ. Have built my own alerting app for when MQ queues breach specific thresholds (executed on a regular basis out of a scheduler) and a monitor that tells me real time info and status of queues, queue depths etc.
use rexx for many admin type functions with DB2. eg generating code to perform data fixes etc.
Neil said:
Rexx has a place even in production application but I agree not appropriate for large volume processing.
REXX is a language like any other. The issue in production is one of code security and change control.
Tools such a RLX/Compile provide the security by compiling your REXX applications into load modules. Using REXX can shorten the development cycle and lower development costs.
Gary said:
Panel content management
I was hoping to be able to get some helpful hints on screen management (panel content). We are having trouble getting some data items on the panels to "refresh". We repopulate the variables, we issues REFRESH commands in the Panel definitions - can't think what we're not doing right - has anybody experienced similar problems? If the user exits the panel and enters it again - all the variables display correctly.
Nate said:
In my previous company, REXX was used in production application but we don't use it in processing the actual data. We used it (along with other mainframe services) to create the jobs needed for our extracts.
We were dealing with historical data still kept (due to regulatory requirements) after the business was sold. As a result of the sale, much of the infrastructure support for the data was retired to cut costs. To address this, we created a process built on REXX.