Re: the promise of java?

Rick,

At 09:26 AM 10/17/97 -0500, you wrote:

>My question was, what's the difference between making an application
>proprietary to windows, and making it proprietary to the as/400?
>
>He couldn't give me an good answer.   He said something about needing
>the tools to do "as400 only" stuff like data queues, and that the tools
>were also to "tune" the ap to run better on an as/400.  

I think this rep was not well-informed. I've had somewhat the same question
as you, about portability vs. the still-pretty-proprietary nature of
AS/400. I think the issues are at least 2:

(1) Whether the client app can be _executed_ anywhere
(2) Whether the backend database will always be AS/400

This issue comes up when writing VB apps and whether to use ODBC or use
some tool with record-level access, like Project Lightning. Of course, VB
is restricted to Windows, but the principle holds, I think, as per add-ons
to it. ODBC (along with its Java parallel, JDBC) allows you, generally
speaking, to use different backend databases, just by selecting a different
driver.

As I understand it, the AS/400 ToolKit contains _no_ AS/400 proprietary
code. (This makes it different from what M$ apparently is doing, by using
platform specific code in some of its classes.) It is only a set of Java
classes that were written by extending standard JDK classes to communicate
with known server programs on the AS/400, with Sockets. Once a Java
applet/application is compiled into Java byte code, these ToolKit classes
are passé. They drop out of the picture completely, and the compiled
applet/application _will_ run on any platform that otherwise supports the
JDK at some requisite level.

This means that a Java application will run stand-alone on a Macintosh, a
Linux box, a Windows NT box, or an AS/400 (no AWT stuff, though), so long
as the JVM exists on the box where it is running. And an applet will run in
any browser or applet viewer, no matter where it is served from.

As far as "tuning" the app, I consider this a lot of sales babble.
According to the ToolKit docs, everything uses the host servers, so there's
no tuning, as such.

All this is AFAIK, YMMV.

HTH

Vernon Hamberg
Systems Software Programmer
Old Republic National Title Insurance Company
400 Second Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55401
(612) 371-1111 x480


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