From: Jon Paris
I use SugarCRM and I love it ... There isn't a business feature in
SugarCRM that an RPG programmer couldn't write with one keyboard tied
behind
their back.
But surely the point is Joe that they _didn't_ or at least they didn't and
place it in the public domain and offer maintenance service. i5
applications of that type cost big $ "mid-level" or not. Same applies for
Help desk software, BBS, wikis, etc. None of them mission critical for
most people, but for sure "nice to have's" and the few i5 apps in this
arena are not cheap.
Jon, I think you miss my point. I agree that these sorts of things are
great applications! They're just not enterprise business applications of
the same type as ERP or banking or indeed any of the sorts of things that
RPG excels at. I also am not certain of the utility of running on the i5:
is it a platform-altering event or a yeah, so what? I suspect it's
somewhere in the middle.
The level of integration with your business systems is what would determine
whether those applications need to run on the i5. If cost is your primary
concern, it's a lot cheaper to run LAMP stuff on a Lintel machine than it is
on the i5. On the other hand, if tight integration and centralized
management trump cost, then you might look at running on the i5. However,
if cost is NOT the object, then an i5 solution becomes an option again.
By the way - you introduced the notion into the discussion that
applications
had to be "mid-level" or above before they had utility. I'm just happy to
see the base of modern applications on the box extended.
No, no, no! I'm not saying anything of the sort! I agree that the sort of
applications that you're talking about--simple, flexible data entry and
retrieval applications with minimal business logic--are certainly useful,
but that they shouldn't be confused with back end business logic that has
been the bailiwick of the midrange.
I worry about the "shiny new tool" syndrome. There are lots of things PHP
does not do well, or at least hasn't been shown to do so in any but isolated
circumstances, and large scale deployment of enterprise business
applications is one of those things. For example, people point to Yahoo as
a reason to use PHP for business, but I doubt that anybody on this list has
the sort of resources that Yahoo has to devote to the project management and
infrastructure of the Yahoo application.
As to the language issues, I'm not going to get into the semantics of that
- we already know we won't agree so there's little point.
I think the decisions between Java and PHP for user interface and/or web
extensions is one of temperament rather than capability. PHP is certainly a
completely capable language. I prefer Java for reasons I've stated, but PHP
is fine -- for the interface side of the project.
It does however
seem to me that Zend and others have taken giant strides in making PHP a
more robust business-oriented language and that they are continuing to do
so.
See, that's where I'm not going. PHP is not a business language, just like
Java isn't a business language. In my opinion, if a language doesn't have a
native decimal number, it's disqualified out of the box.
RPG and COBOL are business languages. PHP and Java are not. Or are you
putting PHP in a class with RPG?
For those i5 users unwilling or unable to dive into the J2EE/Java/JSP/App
Server world, PHP offers easy access to a world of modern features such as
web services. For example:
<?php
$QuoteClient = new
SoapClient("http://services.xmethods.net/soap/urn:xmethods-delayed-
quotes.ws
dl");
$IBM_Price = $QuoteClient->getQuote("ibm");
print("Current IBM stock price is \$$IBM_Price");
?>
Well, yeah, it does that sort of stuff! That's the age-old argument about
standard libraries. By the way, you might want to check out the JAXP
capabilities of Java; they're more robust although not quite as simplistic.
But really, I have no issue with PHP as an ADJUNCT to business programming.
But it is not a replacement for RPG!
By the way, if you REALLY want a powerful scripting language, you might want
to look at Python. Hans Boldt and I don't see eye to eye on a lot of
things, but one place where we do agree is on the pretty incredible power of
Python. And it's available for the i.
http://www.iseriespython.com
Joe
P.S. JAX-WS (the Java equivalent) for the above:
<%
QuotePort port = new QuoteClient().getQuotePort();
BigDecimal price = port.getQuote("IBM");
out.write("Current IBM stock price is " + price);
%>
You generate the client from the WSDL, and all of the plumbing is done for
you.
midrange.com
