On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 11:22 PM, Booth Martin <booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is the System i a reasonable way to offer an internal website that will
be displaying System i business data as web pages?
Yes and no. It depends on a lot of factors:
Do you have people with web experience? If yes, with what platforms do
they have experience? Depending on how big the project is going to
be, it might make sense to reuse skills, thus giving you lower cost -
of course reusing skills severely limits your abilities to select a
platform. For example, if you already have a web dev team with a
large area of ASP.NET expertise, it would be stupid to start a second
team to develop web apps on the System i.
If you do not have any people with web experience, you'll need to hire
people. It might be easier to find qualified candidates with no System
i experience, which would restrict you from using RPG/CGI, and to the
usual platforms (like PHP and Java).
If you are willing to invest a lot of time, it might make sense to
bring your System i developers up to speed on how to create web
applications - this will give you the biggest choice of platforms. But
it won't be cheap.
There are some very nice portal/CMS available for both PHP and Java,
and also appropriate backends for business graphics. However, this
would require a current i5/OS release and beefy hardware, which you
might or might not have. If you are running older Hardware (e.G. a
Model 170 at V4R5) or slow hardware (520/515 with minimal number of
disk arms, memory), it would make sense to run the web application on
a seperate x86 machine, with Linux or Windows as the operating system.
There is no right and wrong: It's just a question of budget and
available skills.
midrange.com
