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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 itâs worth, I have developed a number of storefronts and ot
her
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
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