Re: Opinions on "good news/bad news"... picking Websphere or MS .ASP or .NET -- WEB400

Dave,

My 2 cents would be (as others have said) "It depends". Even though Iuse Eclipse/MyEclipe/WDSC daily, I find that Visual Studio 2005 ispretty nice. I had to write an SOA example using .NET for a Commonpresentation and I was impressed at how easy to use it was. So, on thetool level, I still think MS has a leg up on Eclipse, but then it onlysupports a few MS specific languages. But I am liking the Eclipseplatform more and more. It certainly supports more languages thanVS2005 (duh!) and has a huge amount of muscle behind it. My bias thatleans to MS on this one may have to do that I used VS6 for many manyyears on VB and .ASP projects so it is "comfortable".

When it comes to ? vs IIS, I am a WAS/Apache/Tomcat guy because it seemsto work very well and it is platform agnostic. I move between WinXP,Linux and i5/OS all day long so being able to know where to look forstuff, regardless of platform, is nice. Keeps the learning curve short.The combination of Eclipse plus WAS/Apache/Tomcat is great becausedevelopment and deployment doesn't change as I move from platform toplatform. Again, one IDE, one web server technology, multipleplatforms. To quote Bob Marley "One Love, One Heart, Let's get togetherand feel all right" I feel alright with this stuff. And its all free.I think that Apache and it's brethren own 60% of the web server market.

Of course if you only run Windows clients and only run Windows based webservers and feel that MS licensing is fair and reasonable, VS and IISwill be just fine (although Eclipse and Apache run fine in Windowsenvironments). You'll find plenty of resources that can help youdevelop .NET apps. Get yourself a nice IXA or IXS server and you canrock and roll with your .NET app accessing System i data. If learningcurve and resource cost and availability are a concern, I'd probably gowith Microsoft (I say, gingerly...).

Friday PM musings. Perhaps with with some ruminating on this over theweekend I might be able to strengthen one or the other position.


Pete

Dave Odom wrote:

Gang,

Is this the proper forum to ask about comparing/contrasting starting
Web development against the i5 in Websphere vs. MS .ASP or .NET?   We
can go either way as we have both environments even though some here
lean toward the MS environment because they don't like IBM and because
MS has been "marketed" better and seems to have a better set of
development tools (ease of development, learning curve, etc.).

Our web applications development has started out slow and limited as
there's not much skill here to build anything more than simple web site
pages and some .ASP applications getting/sending data to the i5.   So,
I'm concerned about "ramp up" time (creating the environment, learning,
getting productive) to do some simple apps that display results of
queries (multi-row displays like reports users can scroll through), some

single row display, insert and update. Of course, I expect the typicalinsatiable "need" for more function/feature over time. Development will

not be in RPG so we don't have to worry about that added learning curve.
Most i5 apps are "turn-key" vendor apps and while in RPG, we will not

develop skills in this area.

So, opinions please on both development environments vis-a-vis, ramp
up, short and long term directions, what it takes to set up a Websphere
development/support environment vs. MS and any "tid-bits" you all would
care to offer.

Thanks in advance,

Dave