Re: Online ordering.

Weston,

I agree with Kevin regarding "roll your own" solutions if you want your storefront to present a seamless, well-integrated user experience. New technologies and development tools have removed many of the barriers that once made this kind of project a bear and have made it very approachable and, yes, fun on the System i. There are several ways to skin the cat.

Using RPG and CGI will let you leverage your existing coding skills, and an open source tool like CGIDEV2 can help to ease the learning curve. The down side to CGI, in my opinion, is that performance is a significant issue, it does not scale well, and modifications (refactoring) can be a real chore.

PHP is another option, thanks to the fine folks at Zend. It can run directly on your System i and is, last I checked, available at no charge (support is a chargeable item). Using PHP you can fairly quickly deliver back-end data to the web. The down side, again in my opinion, is that since is it is a scripting mechanism, it can suffer from the same problems that Active Server Page applications do. Unless you use a very good framework to develop your application and adhere to it, it can quickly become tough to maintain and enhance. There are also some issues with performance and scaling, although I know those are being worked on.

Java is another option. Most, if not all, System i boxes comes with a license for WebSphere Express, so you can at least get it installed and up and running for nothing more than your time. Developing applications in Java is more involved than with either the CGI or PHP approach, but newer open source frameworks like Struts 1/2, Java Server Faces, Spring MVC, and Wicket greatly reduce development time and allow you to more directly concentrate on the business logic at hand. These frameworks do have a learning curve associate with them as well, but in my experience, the time investment in learning a framework applies to pretty much any approach you take.

As for integrating with XA, I agree with Kevin there as well. Previously, the old Offline Load mechanism and direct file access was your best shot. However, the Infor System-Link module offers a much more flexible approach using web services and SOA to access XA business objects. I find interfacing RPG and CGI to web services is ugly at best. However, Both PHP and Java offer nice mechanisms to interact with web services, and WDSC even has some handy Java tooling to generate program code and resources automatically from the WSDL.

For what it’s worth, I have developed a number of storefronts and other front ends to XA using each of these technologies and I have found that the Java approach has been the most time and cost effective in the long run. It is an enterprise-level technology and WebSphere, as well as other J2EE application servers, offer a robust environment to deliver efficient, scalable long-term solutions at an effective price point.

Just my $.02.

-=- Pete


Peter Nielsen
Copper Harbor Technologies