|
> Our back end will > remain AS/400 for some time. But how long will that be, remains > to be seen. > When will business decisions based on getting more people to get the job > done. No matter how much business knowledge I have - if there are 5 more > programmers for other platforms, other then the one I'm on. Someone is > going to do the math soon. No matter how much the ROI is on the AS/400 - > people will ignore that when they realize they can get more people faster > and easier then they can find people like myself. More are being produced > every day from Colleges and universities. An interesting point, but not without some serious flaws. The argument Andrew makes is that colleges are turning out developers who can use IIS and JSP as opposed to programming on the AS/400. For what? Not for enterprise level applications. Give me a representative 10 AS/400 programmers and 10 college-produced IIS/JSP developers, and I'm reasonably certain that there are more members in the AS/400 group that understand basic business programming. In fact, given 10 AS/400 programmers and 100 IIS/JSP web application developers, there will STILL be more actual business programming knowledge in the AS/400 group. The AS/400 is not home to whiz-bang web applications. But, in case anybody hasn't noticed, whiz-bang applications aren't actually permeating the business marketplace. Instead, the majority of business web applications seem to be storefronts - please correct me if I'm missing something here. Frankly, I don't care if storefronts are written in VB (provided that the MS machine has only token access to my AS/400!). That's because the back end still has to be something with reasonable performance and ROI. The true wave of web-based business applications has yet to even hit us yet, and a large part of that is because the platforms they're built on can't handle the scaling. Some of that is due to the architecture, but those who know my stance on SQL will understand my reasoning there, so I needn't go into it. (But as a side issue, I'm reasonably certain that college graduates who have taken the basic SQL courses don't have a clue what a LEFT OUTER JOIN is, nor how to apply it in a business environment, so it's not surprising that there are so many SQL performance problems in the industry.) The other part is that somebody who has taken IIS, Java, JSP and SQL in college doesn't know the first thing about designing a promotions and deals database. Or a forecasting module. Or an MRP generation. So while you might see an amazon.com running on a SQL database (don't quote me, I have no idea what they run), you won't see BPCS written in VB anytime soon. In fact, you won't see an ERP package - or even a decent module - written by a recent CompSci graduate anytime soon. How many IIS/JSP developers are APICS certified, I wonder? Which leads to an interesting observation. Rather than worry about turning the AS/400 into a competitor for IIS, why not concentrate on designing systems that take advantage of the undeniable strengths of the AS/400: its incredibly fast, robust, highly scalable database, and it's unparalleled reliability. The AS/400 is the best platform for implementing business rules ever designed, so why not use that strength, rather than diluting it with things it doesn't do quite as well? Let's start thinking about designing applications where the user interface actually isn't tied to the database, where the UI can communicate via a fast, flexible interface to the transaction processor. This way, the user can decide to opt for running the UI on their AS/400 (for lower volume environments), or put a phalanx of web serving PCs in front of the box, with full failover and load balancing. The PCs do all the graphics and the static web stuff (thereby offloading the AS/400) and delegate the access and update of persistent information to the AS/400. But this means designing clients and servers - true n-tier solutions. Even though we've been talking about it for decades, the truth is that, with SQL-based client applications, we're actually moving away from that particular Nirvana. As more and more business rules find their way into the client, there is less need for a fast server - instead, ALL applications run like crap. Once you've gotten your user to accept a 2-second wait, you can write as bloated of code as you'd like. I don't know. I could be whistling past the graveyard here. But I still think the demise of the AS/400 is overstated and a bit premature. Until I start seeing LotusScript experts who can actually write a shop floor module, I'm going to continue to recommend RPG and the AS/400 for business applications. Joe Pluta www.plutabrothers.com
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
This mailing list archive is Copyright 1997-2024 by midrange.com and David Gibbs as a compilation work. Use of the archive is restricted to research of a business or technical nature. Any other uses are prohibited. Full details are available on our policy page. If you have questions about this, please contact [javascript protected email address].
Operating expenses for this site are earned using the Amazon Associate program and Google Adsense.