Hi Thorbjørn;
To answer your question with a question: Who on earth would build an
application server for ILE from scratch.
Yeahahh we did! IceBreak seams like a mad mans work in the first place.
However, you know how easy it is to make java servlets running in a java
servelt container i.e. Tomcat - and this was exactly the same we want to
achieve for ILE - let ILE RPG/COBOL run in a native ILE web container. But
we did not se any options "out there" for that goal six years ago when we
started our modernization journey.
The truth is that we did not make the application server from scratch. We
have used it internally for ages for commercial client/server products for
(in historical order) OS/2, windows, AS/400 and linux over the last
decade++.
However, IceBreak became first a commercial product for system i in 2006'.
But it started back in 1994 in Denmark as a communication middleware product
at PBS - VISA/DANKORT for card clearing (and is still in full production)
So no; IceBreak is not written in RPG. It is written in C / and C++ but
running 100% in the ILE environment - serving ILE. So to say; the "distance"
from your application to the client is as small as possible. This really
reduces the complexity and reduces overhead for RPG/COBOL programmers
compared to run these languages within PHP, EGL and even as web-services in
WebSphere.
And for the same reasons: No - we are not using Apache, since we would be
noting more that another CGI-plugin. All the problems that IceBreak solves
namely scalability, fail safeness, and performance is not easy to deal with
if you don?t have the control over the complete stack.
Best regards
Niels Liisberg
E-mail: nli@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
Sent: 26. maj 2008 21:25
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Impressions of EGL - Part Duex
Niels Liisberg skrev den 26-05-2008 20:42:
Hi Thorbjørn;
I totally agree with you. But the issue here is that OPM (and ILE for that
matter) is as vendor locked in as it can be ... it is 100% IBM / system i.
Many of our customers have the same concerns as you. But in the end of the
day they by into our product because they need the functionality and can
not
afford steep learning curves and/or rewrite all the stuff to JAVA, PHP,
Groovy .. or what ever the hype of tomorrow is ...
Customers seams to have an "Add water - and I have a party" kind attitude
and want the job done ASAP because of the fast transitions in the IT-world
of today.
But I follow you: In a perfect world every thing is cross platform / cross
vendor / cross environment - and all tooling is open-source and having a
huge community. Until then we just have to be more pragmatic from the
application lifecycle perspective and use the tools available on the
market
- and make your COBOL fly yet once again until the future arrives :)
I fully understand your point of view, and also recognize that "this is
the simplest way to get from here to there now" is quite a pragmatic
approach to many things.
I also believe that telling people that the world does not HAVE to be
like "just use the best tool, since it will be unsupported anyway in 5
years", and perhaps things might change someday given enough people
asking for it. That is at least what I gather from what Joe Pluta says
about the new Rational Developer - that those who decide can be reached.
Now that I have you - have you managed to build an industrial strength
web server in RPG or does IceBreak use Apache or something else for that?
midrange.com
