RE: MySQL on System i -- MIDRANGE-L

From: Jon Paris

Nope - I agree that it is tough to consider any language as the foundation
for business when it can't do decimal math.

Where I would classify PHP as similar to Java is in easy of learning for
someone not steeped in OO.

I understand.

>> But really, I have no issue with PHP as an ADJUNCT to business
programming. But it is not a replacement for RPG!

100% agreed. I think the primary difference between us is that you can
get
your head around Java and my brain still rebels at it. I have simply
found PHP a better "fit" for my ancient brain.

For some people VB is the best fit. PHP will always suit some people
better. Even if you get past the OO issue, Java makes you do more work than
PHP because of its minimalist interface; it makes up for it in some very
robust and powerful libraries. PHP, on the other hand, is an exact fit for
generating HTML, because that's what it was written to do; its libraries
concentrate on HTML and web interaction. It tends to be more concise and
require less typing than Java.

Not only the language - but I
also don't need the extra complexity of WAS/Tomcat/whatever.

There's something to be said for the fact that PHP lives where Java doesn't.
As long as it performs acceptably (which it seems to do), it's probably a
better fit for i5 web serving than Java, especially on constrained machines.
Java (and thus WAS) requires too much of the i5's horsepower.

>> ... you might want to look at Python.

I have - but we're back to OO and ancient brains again <grin>

Python is no more or less OO than PHP, I think. Most people say that it's
very easy to learn, although it's NOT a web scripting language, so maybe
that's the issue. PHP is closer to NET.Data than it is to anything else,
and the simplicity of a scripting language is very appealing.

The downside is maintainability as your application grows; once you start
embedding logic in your web pages, making application-wide changes can be
frighteningly difficult. But as you get better at PHP, you can encapsulate
some of that stuff.

- and it is not an IBM supported port and not likely to be.

As to support, that's my problem with PHP. IBM may say they're supporting
it, but really it's Zend, and since IBM's primary focus is Java, how real is
this support going to be? IBM's support for Apache has been quite good. On
the other hand, IBM supported Tomcat too.

>> You generate the client from the WSDL, and all of the plumbing is done
for you.

Haven't you cheated a bit there? No includes? And "generate"? - the PHP
code I showed is the whole thing - nothing up my sleeve!

<laughing> It showed everything except the thousands of lines of code in
the library functions you called! With Java, rather than invoke a generic
class library, you invoke a generic utility which builds the class library
function for you. The downside is that if your WSDL changes, you have to
re-gen. The upside is that the code is compiled and is very fast. That may
or may not be an issue for scalability.

I have not heard anybody suggest - and certainly I will never do so - that
PHP replace RPG. I have simply said that I believe PHP to be easier to
learn than Java for the average RPG programmer and therefore may be a
better fit for those tasks for which Java has been being promoted.

Only for user interface and maybe web services, I think. Java does a whole
lot more than PHP; libraries exist for everything from PDF creation to image
transformation to -- well to you name it. What it comes down to in a lot of
situations is probably which languages library support is better.

The only folks
that I have heard suggesting anything as a replacement for RPG are the EGL
crew!

Yes, them... <harrumph>

Joe