Re: framework question -- JAVA400-L

Hi Charles and Joe,

Let me preface my comments with an old saying from my part of the world - "When elephants fight, the ants have to watch out". I am just an ant attempting to watch out.

I have about 15 years of development experience, I have not bled blue all my programming life, I came out of theoretical computations in BASIC, FORTRAN on wierd boxen and am a recent convert to both Java and RPG ( only about 7 years in each ). My take on this is simple. There are places for Java and there are places for RPG. I would not attempt to write Web Services in RPG, just as I would not attempt to write MRP solutions in Java.

In my current position, more applications are being purchased that require to tie into the master data that is resident on the AS/400. This data is maintained via "old legacy RPG" programs and show no signs of moving into anything else. However, the manager of that application, in his infinite wisdom decided to write programs to access the business logic in the application and expose them as APIs. We have really taken the easiest road possible to make this data available to all applications, using web services written in Java, deployed in Tomcat using Apache-Axis. I see no reason why this is not the "best solution". In the future, as I see it, the AS/400 deployed here will be playing the role it was really built to do - act as an information server (tm).

The initial question was, to paraphrase - What is the ideal framework to deploy enterprise scale applications in a modern environment ? My answer to that would be a framework that looks something like this. 1. A group of cheap Intel boxes running Linux / httpd, load balanced serving the static web pages - talking to 2. A group of AS/400's running Tomcat / Websphere / ( Web server of choice ) using MBeans Replication to keep sessions in sync between them, running Data Access Objects of some sort - talking to 3. A huge AS/400 running nothing else, that contains "Server Programs" in RPG that will retrieve Data and pass them back to the DAOs that convert them into Transfer Objects and pass them along the wire to 4. The JSP/ Velocity Macro / Tea / ( Visualization Engine of your choice ) that display it to the end user.

Our current solution incorporates 2 and 3 in one box and manage to do very well by any application that requires master data.

Regards,
Pillai, Narayanan R

Charles said:

<>Not quite Joe. You are apparently an old-time hack programmer from way back whose only coding criteria is does it work, was it quick to do, and did I do it in RPG.
You, on the other hand, seem to think anybody
who doesn't shoehorn every problem into OO is a backwater hick.  I find
that attitude rather droll.
Joe