Well said, Alan. To be clear, I'd hate to deploy applications to a server where the highest priority task was the one monitoring for keyboard, mouse, and Window events.
That's certainly not my idea of a native GUI. But I think that's what some folks have in mind.
----- Original Message ----
From: Alan Campin <alan0307d@xxxxxxxxx>
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2009 11:46:37 AM
Subject: Re: what was the single mgmt decision made in mid-1990s. period
I have no doubt that if Rochester were to convert IBM i to a native GUI, the platform would take off. But at what cost? Who would license RDI-SOA? Who would need Websphere and all the configuration and performance management services that accompany it?
A non-standard GUI? IBM couldn't give it away.
Just an aside. I have always considered the idea of running GUI's on a
server as insanity. Microsoft does it because they developed a GUI for
games and comsumer and then decided they wanted into the server
market. Doesn't make it right.
Workstation and Servers have completely different design objective
something IBM understands and if you have worked in Windows shops
using PC for business applications and watched the e-mail come flowing
in. "Please shutdown you application. We need to reboot the server",
you know Microsoft doesn't. A GUI is about performance, a server about
stability and security.
The biggest problem I have seen with what IBM is doing with the i is
that Java performance sucks. Hopefully with V6R1 we will begin to get
past that but I still haven't seen any comparisons of running
applications on V6R1 vs running on Windows server. It is hard to get
people to run Java apps on i when they run on PC many many times
faster.
midrange.com
