RE: The Perpetual Myth of iSeries Obsolescence

> From: Douglas W. Palme
> 
> Joe,
> Correct me if I am wrong here but those "expensive CPU cycles" you are
> referring to operate on the batch side, so the cost as far as interactive
> is concerned is not as heavy.

Absolutely, Douglas!  Coupled with the decreasing price of the platform,
it's certainly not as burdensome a cost.  But even with that taken into
account, the price per cycle of our beloved System i is much higher than the
equivalent cycle on a *nix or <shudder> Wintel box.  I'd hazard a guess that
it's at least ten times as much.


> I agree there are hidden costs that need to be evaluated including what is
> the best platform for the situation and not all platforms are applicable
> in all circumstances.

Absolutely.  And for the same reason no one technology is applicable in all
circumstances. 


> Certainly no one size fits all methodology here.

Again I agree.  The folks that avoided the lemming-like charge to Unix/SQL
in the 90s or the equivalent stampede to EJB and Struts in the first part of
this decade are the ones who still have the money to use the more mature
technologies.  (Note that these folks will likely NOT be rushing headlong to
rewrite everything in AJAX, either.)

At the same time, it certainly helps to have a baseline to compare against.
In the midrange, we have 5250 as a baseline to compare UI performance.  It's
not a perfect baseline especially as interfaces become more interactive, but
it's one our users certainly understand.

And for web application architecture, I think JSP Model II is a pretty solid
baseline.  There's really nothing you can't do with it, and it's widely
available on most platforms.  So it seems reasonable to use it as a baseline
to compare things like skills required and development costs and licensing
requirements and flexibility of deployment.

Joe