Re: Web Services Solutions

From: richard@xxxxxxxxxxx

The Grasshopper product us an add-in to Visual Studio that let's you use
some of your new C# or VB skills to write web services that run natively
on the iSeries under Apache Tomcat.

Of course, you can also use the Web Services wizard in WDSC, and you don't
need another IDE or another language or have to flirt with the Dark Side.
Once you know Java, you can eliminate the middleman.

I don't mind .NET on the workstation; I have less use for it on the server.

And the cool part is it's VB running natively on the iSeries.

Not sure about the "coolness" factor here.  It might make the iSeries more
palatable to Microsoft programmers.  Or it might be adding one more log on
the fire of "why do we have this IBM thing"?  Because once it's written in
VB, it's easily moved to .NET and SQL Server and then outsourced to a .NET
firm in Mumbai with offices in Atlanta.

Besides, how much BASIC code do you really want in your shop?

If you're going to use a scripting language, I suggest looking into PHP,
which is directly supported by IBM, and which has lots of support for Web
Services already:

http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2004/03/24/phpws.html

While I'm hardly a PHP advocate, one nice thing about PHP is that it is
protocol agnostic; you can use the lighter weight XML-RPC protocol just as
easily as the much bulkier SOAP interface.  This can really make a
difference in things like Ajax processing.

Joe