DB and App Agnosticism on the iSeries (thinking about: Question about UDB on iSeries)

I started with "RE: Question about UDB on iSeries" but this takes the
discussion off thread so I'll start another:

I am going to extend the conversation to help satisfy some of my questions
about DB2 UDB on the iSeries as well. I wonder how many of us folks are
running the iSeries solely as a DB server and only running the DB using SQL
tables rather than physical files ( I know they are similar but there are
also some fundamental differences between CRTLIB/CRTPF and CREATE
COLLECTION/CREATE TABLE).  How many folks are running iSeries that may serve
applications and those apps are either 100% SQLRPG or 100% Java (that is, no
"native" DB I/O)?

Things get fuzzy in this iSeries world precisely because OS and DB are so
tightly coupled so it is difficult to treat this box solely as a DB server
or an application server.  I know nothing about mainframes but are DB and
applications separate in that world?

My curiosity here stems from the fact that we have raging debates within the
company about developing our apps using a cross platform orientation
(agnostic as to DB and application serving) vs. sticking to what we know and
use RPG and native I/O in our app design.  I love the iSeries for it's
stability and ease of management but I think it is short sighted to write
applications that only run on the iSeries.  Again, I LOVE this box, but the
world out there, as indicated by many of the conversations in this forum,
ain't "iSeries centric" and there is a much bigger market for us to tap into
if we design the software to run on the iSeries AND another platform that
can run Java and a DB like DB2 or mySQL or MSSQL or....

Just wonder what the rest of you thought.

Peter Helgren
Value Added Software, Inc
801.581.1154 x202