RE: MySQL on System i -- MIDRANGE-L

From: Jon Paris

>> I suppose anything that brings users to the box is good, but do you
want
to support business applications written in PHP and MySQL?

Yes. There are a number of good applications out there and I'd love to
see them on the i.

Give me a for instance. And I don't mean this facetiously; I use SugarCRM
and I love it, but I wouldn't consider it even a mid-level business
application from a standpoint of complexity. There isn't a business feature
in SugarCRM that an RPG programmer couldn't write with one keyboard tied
behind their back.

As to bad PHP code of course it is out there - but I've seen
some pretty disgusting Java code too and of course not all RPG is perfect
(just the stuff that you and I have written!)

No, I'm more worried that PHP by its nature is a very non-rigorous
development environment. And in fact, now it's worse because of the dual
nature of the language. It's a scripting language AND an OO language.

As a scripting language, it's no better or worse than others, and that means
that your primary source analysis tool is grep (or some similar text
searching utility). A combination of a good IDE and some really good
development standard can help, but I'm still worried about the state of the
art there. Certainly the Java development capabilities of WDSC far outstrip
its PHP capabilities, so what do you use for an IDE?

Moreover, as an OO language PHP has the problem of all weakly-typed
languages; while absolutely marvelous for short-term and smaller projects,
weak typing requires a much higher degree of external programming discipline
in order to keep track of what the system is doing.

Those very things that make the system so flexible for proof of concept and
rapid deployment (creating classes on the fly or adding methods to objects
dynamically) can really add layers of complexity to debugging and system
analysis of complex applications. I see this every day in the degree of
difficulty in debugging JavaScript as opposed to Java.

Of course you can run LAMP applications in a Linux partition, but that's
hardly the point. We could have run Apache that way too - didn't stop it
from being useful (invaluable?) to have a native port though.

And if you're using PHP strictly to provide something that native tools
don't handle very well, then I agree. But remember: because i5/OS
standardized on Apache, for better or worse we lost the native HTTP server.
I'm not too sure I want to standardize on a non-RPG language for business
logic.

The point is that when MySQL is ported to the box _if_ it does as planned
and uses i5/OS DB2 as its data storage engine, then my "regular" database
tables are now available though MySQL, and the data stored via MySQL is
available to my regular programs. THAT is what's interesting to me. To
be
able to take a canned application written in PHP/MySQL and to write
reports
and other extensions in RPG is I think a very useful option. Rather than
squeeze RPG out it helps to make sure that it remains a viable part of the
enterprise.

No question there. My issue is NOT with an environment where PHP is a way
to extend RPG business logic. My concern is when people start to see PHP as
a replacement for RPG. It's exactly my position with EGL.

Joe