I've just stumbled across an open source RPG Source Editor thats built around a PC Editor called Eclipse - I've only ever used Eclipse for my very infrequent Java work. Having recently decided to upgrade all the Projex400 utilities to RPG/FREE and make them available on this website I'm very excited about this great bit of software.

More details are at RPG NEXT GEN which looks very promising.

This site offers some resources for working with the programming language RPG (native on IBM System i). IMHO IBM has done a poor job so far providing the RPG programming community with any decent software development kit for RPG compared to the Java Development Kit offered by Sun to the java community. Some people might now argue that IBM has done a great job by providing WDSCi and EGL. But perhaps this is comparing apples with pears. Anyway ... where is the solution?

One thing is clear ... there is no current adhoc solution to it. I'm trying to make life a little bit easier for the RPG developers and offer some resources.

It's still in Alpha stages of development but i think this could become a serious rival to the excellent (but expensive) IBMoffering - WDSC.

Reading some forum discussions it seems that it could offer SEP Debugging, and basically anything else if we help the developer. This is a very exciting development and I've already offered my assistance to the website owner. Watch this space!

So, far installation was straight forward

• download it, unzip it, click it!  

and it worked straight out of the box.

I've used it to tentatively edit some legacy RPG3 source code and it's a huge improvement over clunky old SEU.