I recommend keeping your business rules in RPG. Turn them into a set of
reusable routines that can be called from anywhere. RPG is a much
better language for business rules than the alternatives.
Then it won't matter which language you use for the web front-end,
because you'll be able to re-use your RPG from any of them! If you look
at the heated debate you've already started about the alternatives,
you'll see why it's important to be flexible. The community has not yet
settled on which is the best way to make the front-end.
CGIDEV2 is the best performing front-end method that I've tried, and is
the easiest way for an RPG programmer to start. But it is lacking in
tooling and frameworks (though, the ones that do exist are generally
very good) and the pool of CGIDEV2 programmers you could hire to help
you is comparatively small.
PHP is the fastest growing. PHP seems to be dominating the attention at
IBM i conferences, and is a great tool with excellent tooling,
frameworks and support.
EGL has many advantages over the alternatives, and has great tooling and
frameworks, but I'm very skeptical about whether it'll ever gain a lot
of developers. It's not free (USD $2000 per developer) like the
alternatives, and is not an open community project, but rather a
proprietary IBM one. Most people run it on a Java app server like
WebSphere or Tomcat, which requires more system resources and expertise
to run, but has some advantages in a large enterprise. EGL has
interesting possibilities... I just don't know if it'll ever reach the
critical mass it needs to succeed...
Java, JSP, JSF... I've always found to be very difficult to learn.
Just my opinion. I'm not a fan of Java, and even the Java experts
lately seem to be recommending alternatives like EGL or PHP.
.NET... I'm not a Microsoft fan. I've spent too much time fighting
with Windows to ever want to use it for anything mission-critical.
Languages like Python, Ruby, LUA, etc... I consider these to be boutique
languages. There have been a lot of talk about them, but they've never
really hit critical mass. Their support on IBM i is rather weak, but I
suppose if you were plannint to run your front-end on Linux they might
be alternatives. Personally, I'd stick with one of the suggestions above.
Having said all of that... I want to say this very loud and clear: THE
ABSOLUTE WORST DECISION IS TO DO NOTHING. Even if you take one of the
suggestions I dislike, it's going to be a heck of a lot better than
doing nothing. You *will* make mistakes at first. So go ahead and do
it wrong... it's perfectly okay to do it wrong, you'll learn, and find
out the best solutions for you as you learn.
But please don't look at all of the choices and say "I'm confused, so I
don't do anything." Do SOMETHING, even if it's wrong.
PEPITOVADECURT wrote:
i have a business aplication developed with RPGIV (also using CL, PRT,
PF and DSP) and now I need to modernise the aplication.
If you done the same, please comment your experience.
I've tinked rewrite the application in Java or Python?
What graphic interface?
midrange.com
