Re: RPG as Web service

From: Aaron Bartell
Stay tuned to IBMSystemsMag.com(December issue I believe) as
I just submitted an article ...

Let us know when your article comes out. You didn't say whether you were doing web services with RPG or Java, but we're seeing a lot of Java tooling for web services, and I'd personally like to see more tooling and plumbing running under ILE. I'd like to see the gap closed between RPG vs. Java tooling.

Shannon O'Donnell's article in ITJUNGLE was titled "Creating an RPG-based Web Service", but all the web service logic was Java. Java controlled the process. The RPG code was wimpy, to put it mildly. The RPG program added a library to a library list, fetched to a database record, and filled in return parameter values. That's about it. Kind of like throwing a bone to the RPG developer.

ILE under IBM i is too valuable of a resource to waste on wimpy code. If that's all that you're going to do with it, you'd be better off writing the whole thing in Java.

No offense to Shannon. I understand that the RPG example was simple on purpose, in order to focus instead on the tooling available in WDSC. But let me say that I'd personally prefer to see RPG in the driver seat.

And to be even more frank, I'm writing web applications where RPG is in the driver seat, responding to browser requests, but at some point I'll need to evoke web services, and I'd like them to be written in RPG too.

Nathan.