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I just heard about a new product by LANSA called LongRange. A native mobile app builder for RPG developers that uses RPG and DDS.
Has anyone else heard of this product, or better yet has anyone tried this product?
Nope, and they usually send me a note about their new productions. Do you mean it uses RPG on the back-end or has some kind of RPG compiler that generates binaries for the target mobile platform?
I was part of the beta program for LongRange and it's a pretty amazing product. A native app is installed on the mobile device that controls form display, navigation, accessing device components such as the camera or GPS, etc... All of the actual coding is done with RPG and DDS. The LongRange server component handles the interaction between your RPG program and the actual mobile device. It works great and is extremely easy to work with. When I joined the beta program I spent 2 days installing everything and going through the tutorials. About 4 days later I had a complete Customer Service app running on my iPad and iPhone that accessed data from my ERP system (we are an ERP vendor) to do customer lookups, display transaction history, product lookups, add products to a shopping cart and create orders in the ERP system. I used Google Maps and the GPS to show the devices current location in relationship to the customer address, and I used the camera on the device as a barcode scanner to scan barcodes for adding products to the shopping cart. I also used the camera and text editor on the device to attach video and text files to products in our product master file. The files are stored on the IFS and are available to anyone else running the app on another mobile device, as well as any other user with access to the IFS. I also used the Google Charts API to display charts and graphs using Customer Sales Analysis data retrieved from the ERP database. Like I said, amazingly simple to do all of this in just a couple days work.