I've been programming in REXX for many years on VM, TSO, OS/2, and NT
(Quercus). The bulk of the work that I use REXX for is to automate large,
complex, repetitive infrastructure focused tasks. REXX programs do
everything from help monitor and maintain our e-mail infrastructure to
automate operations tasks under CA's TNG product. We're about to start a
fairly large scale migration from cc:Mail to Notes/Domino. Many of the
concepts of the monitoring and management tools that we've developed to
support our existing cc:Mail network will need to be ported to our new
Notes/Domino infrastructure.

I've worked with dozens of programming languages in the past so I started
brushing up on Java, assuming that we'll be developing Java based Domino
agents to implement many of these ideas. While Java is a fine programming
language, I have spent so many years working with REXX I have taken for
granted how great of a language REXX is. Java won't be too difficult but it
will not be as nice to work with as REXX. When you look at the rigid
variable typing, the poor string parsing (relative to REXX) I really wish I
could use REXX instead. When I look at how effortless it is to read in
records from a text file and parse the text into variables that can be of
any data type with REXX, I'll really miss it. Sure, I can do it with Java
but Java isn't REXX.

At one time, was there a version of REXX that ran under Domino? I don't
know anything about NetREXX but it is my understanding that it produces the
same output as Java code being processed by a Java compiler. Is that true?
If so, do you know of any companies that are using NetREXX instead of Java
or LotusScript to develop Domino agents with REXX?

Marty Doyle