RE: Green screen to GUI

Hi Joe,

        You make a lot of sense Joe.  And what you say is, from my own 
experience,
quite true.  Do you think that IBM has done as well with the interfaces for
this stuff as Micro$oft has?  I confess I seldom use Micro$oft tools and
base my opinion on what those I have worked with tell me and my passing
familiarity with VB.

        I believe a large part of *my* problem may have been that the wsdl I was
given was generated by front line Micro$oft tools which are written to
discourage use by people like me.  But that doesn't answer for the time I
spent trying to get ANY app installed in was.  Then the time I spent trying
to install the webservice (I finally found out that of the several
approaches (menu options in admin) to installing applications only one has
actually worked for me).

        I now have created a new virtual host and assigned it to my new 
webservice.
And now was won't start.  Where are the error messages? I am sure
comprehensible error messages exist somewhere, But where?  I don't know.  So
now I call IBM again and wait for someone to call me back while the deadline
looms closer and closer.

        Maybe everybody goes through this sort of thing and the Microsoft guys 
are
shading the truth to make the koolaid look sweeter - I don't know.  But if
this is normal, I will be glad when I have paid enough of my dues to get
past this and have an application server that runs and can be managed.  They
say you can get used to hanging if you hang long enough...

Regards,

Rick DuVall
Systems Manager
Dealer's Auto Auction of Okc
405 947-2886 Ext:143
rick@xxxxxxxxxx


-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces+r_c_duvall=daaokc.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces+r_c_duvall=daaokc.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf
Of Joe Pluta
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2005 12:40 PM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: RE: Green screen to GUI


I understand what you're saying, Rick, but you have to realize: none of
this stuff is actually standardized.  This isn't like disk I/O or 5250
communications or even, God help us, Bisync.  This is the exciting world
of the web: bloated, arcane, and inscrutable.

Look at a SOAP document (which us the underlying technology of Web
Services).  It is clearly a really poorly implemented
design-by-committee piece of junk.  It's got more overhead than a
pork-barrel political project, with required fields that shouldn't be
and default values for other fields which make no sense.  You could
strip out 50% of a SOAP message and still have lots of fat to cut.

There hasn't been a decently designed web protocol since the original
HTTP, and those that come close (such as XML-RPC) get squashed by
vendors like Microsoft, who insist on standards that require big,
complicated IDEs just to create a simple Hello World.

Anyway, I wish I could tell you it gets better, but it doesn't.  HTML is
relatively standardized, but JavaScript isn't.  Cascading Style Sheets
are also pretty solid, but frameworks packages bloom, wither and die in
a cycle sometimes measured in months.

As someone said, we're sort of in the VHS vs. Betamax stage, although I
liken it more to the pre-XMODEM days of async ommunications.  Back then
there were a gillion protocols all vying for position, and the simplest
actually won.  I hold less hope for the networked services community,
simply because it is dominated by theory-heavy committees, not
hands-dirty technicians, but that's just me.  <g>

Joe



> From: Rick DuVall
>
> I just hate spending my time wrestling with 'how does it really
> work and how can I make it work?' issues when in my mind the
> infrastructure of this web stuff should be exposed in a very
> obvious way.