RE: The Perpetual Myth of iSeries Obsolescence

> From: Tom Jedrzejewicz
> 
> CGIDEV2 is free, the incremental cost of serving .NET is pretty
> small, and Tomcat is free.

Boy.  I try to stay out of philosophical discussions these days, but them's
fightin' words <g>.

If you have a reason to go to a GUI (and for many people, replacing 5250
emulation with a browser is reason enough), then you need to make a careful
decision because a bad choice in GUI can cripple your project and is often a
good excuse for getting rid of that bad old AS/400.

RPG-CGI has a number of hidden costs, chief of which is a lack of
portability.  You will always have to use the expensive cycles of your
iSeries box to format HTML strings.  Not necessarily bad, but certainly not
free.

The POTENTIAL incremental cost of .NET is quite large considering the
security implications of running IIS.  As always, the single biggest problem
with the Microsoft stack is the fact that it runs on Windows.

Tomcat is indeed free.  And runs very well on both the iSeries and on cheap
"sidecar" boxes (by cheap I mean <$500).  Plus it runs JSP Model II, which
is perhaps the best web application architecture available today.

Joe