Re: EGL vs. Java

Nathan Andelin wrote:

Joe Pluta wrote:
There's really only one magic bullet in the i5/OS holster, and that's the incredible performance.

Joe, while performance is critical, I think your statement needs to be expanded upon. Consider the WRKACTJOB command, which gives you a view of a system where hundreds or even thousands of jobs are active, and where there are actually even hundreds and thousands of other processes going on under the covers. The task dispatching and workload managment capabilities of the OS are incomparable in the industry.

If I had to name only one magic bullet, it would be the Native Virtual Machine. Any other platform in the world can scale by adding a physical tier in front of, or along side another server. But I'd much rather add another processor to a single server and let the native virtual machine manage the workload than monkey with another physical tier.

I'm not going to argue the point, Nathan, because it's an opinion and as you know, I'm avoiding the opinion issues. But I do understand your point and actually agree with your assessments to a degree, so let me just tell you why I didn't pick them.

Workload management is far more an issue for mixed workloads such as interactive, batch and distributed. But the future of the machine is little or no interactive work. Batch programming is also somewhat anachronistic, with the possible exception of data aggregation for BI. So, yes, those are still there, but they mean less today. I don't think you can sell a C-level executive on the benefits of output queues.

Your issues on scalability are also well reasoned, but again I'm not certain they sell to the C-levels. If I can show them 16 millisecond response time on a hot web screen, that's going to sell the box.

That's not to say that your points aren't important. They're just not what sells; they just make it clear to the IT manager that it won't cost him an arm and a leg to implement, so he won't work hard to veto the choice.

Anyway, all good things. But I still say that RPG to native DB2 performance is the one thing that makes the machine stand out. People who say performance doesn't matter are those that don't perform very well <grin>.

Joe