Re: Jon Paris post

On 6-Jun-08, at 3:11 PM, Joe Pluta wrote:

If your clients are using .NET as their web enabling approach, then you

are going to have to deal with that. IBM isn't going to fix that, nor
should they.

If they want EGL to achieve world domination in an MS centric world they will have to do something to embrace/co-habit just as PHP and others have. In a time when even MS appear to (at least pretending to ) embrace other people's technologies (witness IronRuby) I don't see how IBM can afford to simply say "we're right - come on over" - it won't wash.

People who choose .NET get exactly what they choose. If
the Microsoft advocates have that sort of sway over the shop, then DB2
and the i aren't long for that location anyway.

Sorry but I don't agree. The reason that MS got in the door was that the "i" (or 400 as it then was) was slow to come to the web party. As a result in many companies there is a perception that the "i" can't do web. That let the MSites in the door. When faced with a challenge (which WAS certainly is) they naturally put up the defenses. However, I have worked with a number of such shops where stealth methods have succeeded in getting the "i" back in the game.

If you can't convince your clients of the benefits of a cross- platform,
end-to-end single-language solution, then it doesn't matter what you do.

To many the cross-platform thing is no biggie (heck they wouldn't stay with RPG if it were) But it isn't really single-language anyway is it. As a minimum there's EGL and RPG. And nothing I have seen or heard so far leads me to believe that you really can deploy EGL to any great extent without a thorough knowledge of the underlying Java technologies.

RPG-CGI or PHP will be a bad holding pattern until the data gets moved
to SQL Server. In my opinion, you need to be expounding on the benefits
of the IBM vision, which is a single integrated tool suite that supports
development for all your platforms, rather than taking them down a
technically inferior road such as PHP.

Well the folks on IBM's AlphaWorks don't seem dso down on PHP as you are. More to the point, RPG-CGI or PHP gets the box back in the game then that's what matters. We both know that we'll never agree on this so I won't waste my breath. However, we both know that technical superiority is a pointless argument - if it mattered we'd all be running on "i" with OS/2 on our desktops!

Jon Paris

www.Partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com