Re: Windows vs i5/OS as a platform

From: albartell

What you are describing is exactly the reason I try to steer people away
from glam and glitter technologies like Java and .NET as a way to
modernize
their existing RPG apps. Sure you can do things easier on the front end,
but you lose a lot of the backend stuff that will cause major headaches
for
maintenance programmers and all of a sudden it takes three people to debug
a problem on your web site.

Oh poo, Aaron. <grin>

As I said in a previous message, you can use any front end (Java, PHP,
Python, even .NET) provided your back end is solid. In fact, in a proper
design, you shouldn't care what your UI looks like; it ought to be entirely
transparent to the business logic.

The converse of that is that you ought to be able to test the bejeezus out
of your UI including all sorts of end-point conditions just by writing
simple test servers. You ought to be able to make sure that all the UI code
works before you ever even hook it up to a server.

In the case of the web, the part that runs on the server, the generation and
presentation of HTML, really isn't that hard to debug. Call a server, make
sure the right HTML is getting sent out. You can even automate a lot of
that using something like WebRoller.

In reality, the hard part of the UI testing in the web is the JavaScript and
CSS and all that happy crap, and that's no easier to debug using RPG-CGI
than it is using Java or any other presentation methodology, since the code
to be debugged is running on the workstation.

Joe