RE: EJB versus RPG/COBOL

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Dieter Bender
> 
> reading some of 
> your postings the whole world does application development the wrong
way,
> only who uses RPG wherever possible is a good guy. But most
applications
> are written in diffrent languages and not in RPG and the as400
> installations are getting less, the only growing market in information
> technology is Linux and Java.
> 
> In my opinion
> the as400 is a very good database server and its one chance to survive
for
> this platform as a database server for java applications.

Dieter, I've heard you say this same thing over and over for years now,
and I'm not going to spend a lot of time arguing with you.  Rather than
take the time to try and understand what I am saying, you seem to just
want to attack it at every juncture.  That's fine, but it's pretty
unproductive.

For example, the iSeries is not a database server.  It was never
designed for that.  It is a business rules server.  And if you knew how
to write applications that took advantage of that, we wouldn't hear you
complaining about poor performance.

I disagree with your fundamental application design strategy.  For
example, you keep bringing up inheritance.  Any good Java programmer
knows that a loosely coupled design uses very little inheritance.
Composition is by far the more prevalent method of aggregation,
especially given Java's single inheritance model.

As to the growing market in Java and Linux, that's all fine and good for
a software vendor, but it is my opinion that software firms who write
platform independent code are maximizing their profit at the expense of
their users' productivity.  What works on Wintel doesn't work on Linux;
what work on OS/400 doesn't work on Sun.  Anybody who tries to shoehorn
the same code into every box is doing their clients a disservice.

Anyway, that's my bit.  My clients, who understand and appreciate the
TCO benefits of the iSeries, will continue to write their business logic
in RPG or COBOL and then do a simple interface to their servlets for
presentation.  EJB is overkill for anything other than software vendors.

Joe