RE: Who Uses WebSphere Express? -- MIDRANGE-L

Jon,

Sorry for not quoting you at all.  Notes WebMail makes it not worth trying.

It does seem to be an unchallenged "convention" that CGI does not scale.
Meaning it has been said so many times that people just believe it.  I have
always wondered with the difference in the arcitechture of OS/400 how much
it even applies.  It would be interesting to see someone test the theory
and define the issue better.  On other platforms, the PHP people seem to be
really challenging the issue and showing that PHP, which uses CGI, actually
scales better than J2EE and .NET.

My guess is that if someone really analyzed this they would fine that CGI
outperforms Java when there are only a few users.  Somewhere between 10 and
25 they would be statistically even, and not until you get well past 100
might Java start to pull ahead.  But that is all just a guess and I bet it
would vary wildly between an older 270, a new 520 and then a larger system
like a 570.  My main point is that I bet that the point where CGI breaks
down is well beyond the usage that 90% of OS/400 users would throw at it.

I prefer the Java Model II approach because I think it gives me something
that I can enhance and maintain much faster than I could a CGI solution.
That opinion is obviously highly subjective.  I use an architecture where I
call RPGLE programs to perform all database updates, and I otherwise use
Java for everything else, including queries.  I do not use JDBC to update
the database.  The point being that I do feel that RPG plays a big role in
this and allows me to deliver a better application than I could on other
platforms.

As for some of your other comments:

"Deciphering Java errors is black magic"

I understand what you are saying, but if you really stepped back from it
and looked at it objectively, I think you could come to accept that is just
a matter of learning the environment.  You teach RPG.  Surely you have seen
some otherwise smart people look pretty dumbfounded at what OS/400 tells
them.  It is perfectly obvious to you and me, but it isn't obvious to
someone that is learning.  Java is no different.  As an example, while I
have not expended a great deal of effort on this, I have never understood
how to configure Apache to run RPG-CGI programs.  I got it on the Original
server, but am very confused when I tried to figure it out with Apache.
Running WebSphere is a check box.

"General CGI bashing"

How much of this have you really seen?  I would agree that IBM never
promoted CGI, and they did promote Java, but I do not really recall them
bashing CGI.  They simply said that Java is the way to go.  In their
defense, they would never, ever, draw a new user to the box by promoting
RPG-CGI.  Conventional wisdom on all other boxes is that CGI is old and
bad.  That being said, I bet CGI powers well over 50% of the dynamic
content on the Web.

"WebSphere System Resources"

I think you have exaggerated this slightly.  Either that you just are not
that experienced with it in real usage.  The problem with WebSphere is that
all of its worst features are in the areas you need most when you learn it.
Starting and stopping WebSphere is painful.  Installing apps can be
painful.  These things are all slow and suck up resources and these are the
exact things you do constantly when you are kicking the tires.  However,
once apps are running they do not hit the system that hard, and the number
of users using it seems to have very little impact.  It is much more based
on what the app itself needs to do.  A big query is a big query no matter
where it comes from.  Our previous system was a smallish 270 (300 CPW?).
We had 2 production WAS Express instances, running severall apps.  We also
had a WAS 4 instance running, and several QA WAS Express instances.  I
thought performance was good and the system was really used for other
purposes.  We just stopped and started the servers at night around backups
and never noticed the issues.  We are now on a bigger 520 partition and
everything is much better.  Starting and stopping the server is far less
painful.

Mark


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