Best practices, Stored procedure or Call program

Hello,

We are embarking on a Websphere project and I
considering the architecture we will be using. I'm
fairly new to my current organization, however, I have
a lot of experience in AS/400-RPG and Websphere in
non-AS/400 environments. 

An initial design I was presented with used Stored
procedures to write to files then call a stored
procedure to process the data and return a result. The
problem then was that the data we had setup would have
quite a bit of additional data added and getting this
data back to the Web app would be quite complex.

I considered then that Hibernate would be a good tool
to use to write to the database and then read back
stuff to the web app. Also we would still have to call
RPG programs however I would prefer to use the Toolbox
Call Program interface rather than stored procedures.

In some initial test, I've found that Hibernate
performs at least as well if not significantly better
than stored procedures. The differences in using
hibernate versus stored procedures will be huge in
terms of ease of use.

I'm quite happy in the choices I've made however these
have to be approved by our consultants whom I suspect
have little exposure to things like Hibernate so would
be unwilling to accept that as best practice. We also
have a new project manager who has Websphere
experience however no AS/400/iSeries/i5 (What do we
call this thing!!) experience so wants to consider
clustered intel servers.

So for those of you that have got this far:

Has anyone used Hibernate on i whatchacallit 400 box
thingy ePeriodical? What has been their experience,
particularly in terms of performance?

Why choose Stored procedure call over Program call?

Is Websphere (Express) on iSeries superior to
Websphere on WIntel or linuX/Unix?

Has anyone considered/have an opinion with the
comparison to Spring compared with full J2EE/CMP/CMR.

Thanks in advance for any replies,
Mike



                
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