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Joe, Im lost here,whats wrong with business rules in SQL? I would like to drill down deep to the nitty gritty of what you dont like aboubt SQL. BTW I thought IBM invented SQL in the first place Thanks in advance Dave ----- Original Message ----- From: "Joe Pluta" <joepluta@PlutaBrothers.com> To: <midrange-l@midrange.com> Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2001 6:41 PM Subject: Green screen - it's time is over > Man, I thought I was long winded. The same arguments have been being > repeated over and over here, to what avail I'm not sure. But I thought I'd > try to recap a couple of the salient points, and then try to make something > constructive. > > 1. IBM did not one day say, "Let's charge extra for interactive!" The price > per CPW has been dropping for both interactive and batch machines. It's > just that the batch machines are dropping much, much faster. I don't know > IBM's philosophy, nor does anyone on this list, but I have a feeling it has > something to do with trying to get as much revenue as possible from the > green screen while at the same time moving away from it. Which brings me > to... > > 2. Green screen is going away. The old 5250 interactive feature, which made > the AS/400 pretty much unique among the midrange world, is gone. Dead. > Kaput. You can still try to hang on to the old architecture, but it will > cost you. That's the reality, no matter how much wailing and gnashing of > teeth happens here. If you think you can change it, I suggest you get > together a coalition of people and talk to IBM. Constantly rehashing the > argument here isn't going to do anything to change the reality of the > current situation. > > And that's what I want to focus on for a moment. > > The truth is that the AS/400, now spelled iSeries, is still the best > business platform available. But its uniqueness no longer resides in that > wonderful integrated 24x80 window that we grew up with. Instead, it lies in > the ability to write powerful applications in languages with tight > integration to its incredible database. Personally, I think IBM's direction > of pushing everything to SQL is ludicrous, but it is silly for me to whine > about SQL. Instead, I need to embrace it as best I can and work it into a > realistic development environment. > > What I can do is to try to stop the proliferation of a couple of bad > elements: > > ODBC. Plain and simple, ODBC is a horrid idea for anything but the > occasional data mining application. If you need to update data, do it > through servers. In fact, learn to love the concept of tiered designs, and > build your applications accordingly. It won't cost you a lot, and once you > have, it will be wonderful. It sure beats SQL, which I have shown > repeatedly to be far inferior in performance to record-level access for any > transaction-based updates. > > J2EE. Enterprise Java Beans simply have little place in most applications. > The overhead is excessive, and a standard way of defining business objects > and the methods that update them simply hasn't been developed yet. Until > that time, EJB is simply extra overhead. > > If we avoid these two things, the iSeries, especially in its server > incarnation, beats any other machine out there hands down in total cost of > ownership, and in reliability and scalability. If we join together to > develop some standard interfaces that allow data and programs on the iSeries > to be incorporated into general n-tier distributed applications, then the > iSeries will easily take on all comers. > > Or, we can continue to bemoan the loss of our beloved green screen. We can > reminisce wistfully about nickel soda pops and drive-in theaters, while the > world zips on by with Internet enabled applications running on Microsoft IIS > talking to whatever database server currently isn't crashing or locking up. > We can get used to unreliable systems and long delays while "indexes are > rebuilt" or "servers are synchronized". We can twiddle our thumbs and > remember the good old days as yet another mission critical system succumbs > to some hacker's latest love child. > > It's up to us. The future is here, and in the future I see, the iSeries has > a huge part. But it's not going to be as just another ODBC server - it's > going to be as the central business logic processor of my networked > applications. I may have Microsoft, I may have Linux - in fact I may have > many of those boxes, since I'll need failover for the toy operating systems > that run the Flash presentations that smooth-talking dot-com consultants > sell to management. But when push comes to shove, my mission critical > systems are going to be written in RPG, run on DB2, and talk to the world > through secure messaging. > > You with me? If so, quit worrying about the demise of the green screen. > It's already happened, but we just haven't admitted it yet. Right or wrong, > the brave new world is upon us, and it's up to us to bring our platform into > it. And if we do... if we do, we'll have not only the best damned server on > the market, but a whole new architecture that may just roll back some of the > tide of bloatware that has tainted our industry and our profession ever > since the first release of Windows. > > No, I may never write an entire operating system in 32KB again, but I can > fight to make sure that business rules aren't written in SQL and databases > aren't updated by Java Beans. At least for a little while. And that isn't > just tilting at windmills, I don't think. > > Joe Pluta > www.plutabrothers.com > > _______________________________________________ > This is the Midrange Systems Technical Discussion (MIDRANGE-L) mailing list > To post a message email: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options, > visit: http://lists.midrange.com/cgi-bin/listinfo/midrange-l > or email: MIDRANGE-L-request@midrange.com > Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives > at http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l. > >
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