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Simon Coulter wrote:
That's just marketing fluff and only works while you have a need for OS/400 applications.

I partially agree with you. It's not really "fluff" -- but you're completely right that it only works while you have a need for OS/400 apps. You'll never bring new customers to the box by saying "look, we can do what AIX can do!"

However, there are situations where I can get software in PASE/QShell that I can't solve without them unless I want to build it from the ground up. For small, niche things this makes sense to me. It's not profitable to create something for i if there are only a handful of potential customers. Having the ability to bring in code from a more mainstream platform solves this problem. For things that are more mainstream, a full native version is always better.

If that need ceases, perhaps because you've built a business system around PASE applications, then why would you keep Unix-y things running on a non-Unix box? Especially when most sites have Unix and WinDOS systems too.

Agreed. I've been saying this for years. Every year IBM comes out and announces these great "innovations" and they involve stuff like "look, now you can run Windows on i" or Linux, or AIX, or Linux applications, or AIX applications...

You can't ever be a leader in the industry if that's what you do. You can only be a follower, at best. You'll never gain new customers by saying "look, I can do what AIX can do, almost as well as AIX can" Uhhhh... who would buy THAT instead of AIX?


Java yes, PHP maybe but most of what you might do with that can be done in Rexx which we've had for years with no real interest from OS/ 400 programmers, QSHELL is a quick fix to handle stream files in a more Unix-y fashion primarily to assist Unix vendors, PASE exists solely to assist Unix vendors.

Actually, IBM created QShell to provide an environment for Java. To be completely compliant with Sun's requirement that Java work the same on all platforms, you need an environment where you can run the java command line, have stdout come out on the screen and/or redirect it, etc. IBM i didn't have that -- at least not to the extent that it could be fully compliant with what Sun required -- until they made QShell.

Granted, lots of people are using QShell for non-Java things -- and they should, because it does have some utilities that are currently unmatched in the native environment. However, IBM's original intent was to create QShell for Java. In fact, if you look at the early releases of Java on OS/400 you'll find QShell to be part of the Java documentation.

For example, why does PHP require its own web server? Why is that running in PASE? Why can't it use the IBM Apache server (as more than just a conduit)? Hmm?

IMHO, this is an excellent point. I asked that of Zend immediately when they announced (but hadn't yet released) PHP on i. I asked "will this be a native version? Or are you going to run the AIX version in emulation?" They made it clear to me that theirs was native... then released it in PASE. I complained, and they responded that PASE is native since it runs directly on the hardware, so no emulation is required. Obviously we had different ideas about what was meant by emulation...

But, could they really run PHP natively on i? I mean, once you factor in all of the different plugins that would be required, many are open source and cross platform, but expect certain things to be true about the OS, that includes the OS being implemented in ASCII, having stdin/out with full redirection, being able to use long names for compiled objects, etc. Remember, PHP isn't created by a company to service IBM i customers. It's created by the community in a serious of many open source projects. How vast would the changes to OS/400 have to be to support all of that natively?

But, I personally WISH it was native. I hate running two Apache instances. Configuring the web server to do all of the things I want to do is definitely more difficult, since I can't use IBM directives in the PASE Apache, and the proxy that's in a native server can't always do the job because it's only a proxy.

I guess it's a tricky thing... I really want it to be native, but I can see the argument against it. It's too bad that things aren't the other way around, that IBM i isn't the mainstream version that everyone's writing stuff for, and the Unix things less mainstream. That seems backwards. Unix is much less user friendly, much harder to administer, harder to upgrade, harder to keep stable, harder to keep secure, etc. It's not as well designed as OS/400. It really seems backwards that they are the mainstream option and we are not.

But, as far as SFTP goes... I think it'd be an awesome native application. It'd be better in the native environment than in PASE.

But it's not... and I'm working for a sausage company, and am not really in a position to make a native app... so I make do with what I have available, the Unix one. I try my best to help others use it too, not because I want to see them use a Unix environment, but because they have a business problem to solve.

But until someone at IBM understands the value of i vs other environments, and IBM starts promoting it, and drawing in new customers, making it more mainstream... well, we'll get by with what we have. What else can we do?

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