Re: A Dialogue

Roy,

I have had some experience with this. Particularly with developing a cross platform solution (Windows, Linux and i5/OS). I have a post about it in imho.midrange.com. Part 2 might answers some of your questions: http://imho.midrange.com/2007/06/19/system-i-evolution-part-2/ It's a good place to look for other published insights as well.

The biggest issue is that PHP and Java will probably your best bet in the "build once, deploy everywhere" context and both those skills will be a radical shift for your developers. Not impossible, just radical. The System i is a fine platform and RPG your best bet if you plan to always have one in your hardware mix. However, if you want to move to something that would be deployable across Windows, *NIX and i5/OS with no System i required, then you have some work cut out for you. You'll need a cross platform DB (DB2, MySQL, and the like) and you'll need a language that can run either "natively" on each platform (like Java) or something that can be hosted in PASE (like PHP, Perl, Ruby /Rails). Like I said, Java servlets and PHP are probably the most likely solutions.

Expect to double or triple your development time, even once you have settled on a language and have become proficient in it. The browser world is a whole new animal (HTML,CSS,Javascript,XML, browser compatibility and the like).

Pete Helgren



Roy Luce wrote:

Systems Plus has a green screen application installed at a significant
customer's location.


That customer has told us that to secure any substantial new business we
must deliver a GUI version of our application.

We been told further that the application must be reside totally on the
iSeries and support a browser based user interface.


If we are going to deliver a GUI version we want to do the programming once
- meaning we want a version that can be delivered to the iSeries environment
as well as Linux, Unix and Windows.

Research over the past few days indicates few viable options are available
to meet this objective. One of those options is programming in Java.


I'm looking for feedback relative to Java on the iSeries (suitability for
our purposes, etc.) and the portability of the code to other environments.



Roy Luce

Systems Plus - Midwest


Direct: 847-540-9635

800-913-PLUS (7587)

Cell: 847-910-0884

Email: rluce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx