RE: Look Mom - No Application Servers

> From: Pete Helgren
> 
> However, if I was starting from scratch, I'd design things much more
> simply and probably stick with RPG if the solution was System i
> centric.  The missing piece is the web services interface for RPG
> programs but I am working on that....

That's just not the direction I'd take.  I'd certainly keep all business
logic in RPG, but I'd much rather have the web serving piece in Java, for at
least two different reasons.

First, the plethora of web handling code that I don't have to write.  I
mean, you're going to have a browser interface, right?  Well, all the
session handling stuff is already there for me, I don't have to rewrite it
all.  All the web services stuff is already in place as well.  Have you seen
the JAX code?  It makes Web Services look like child's play.  There are a
wide variety of frameworks available, and even some framework-aware IDEs.
Reinventing all those wheels for RPG is just a bad idea, especially since
JSPs eventually compile down to machine code.  No matter how sophisticated
your RPG-CGI code is, at the end of the day you're still parsing and
plugging templates.

Second, I can offload the interface piece.  Depending on my business
requirements, I can have everything on one System i, or I can put a second
System i in the DMZ, or I can use a whole battery of cheap Linux boxes for
failover and load balancing, or any of a number of different configurations
that I just don't get with RPG.

So unless you have some sort of aversion to Java, there's simply no good
reason to use RPG for your web tier.

Joe