RE: Java performance on the i ? Good? bad? OK?

Well I do have to agree that my JAVA experience is very limited. I do
know every JAVA built application I have ever run has been extremely
slow to start up. I have also had to install old version of JAVA VM to
get applications to run, they would not with just the latest version
installed.

I also know that our programmer have written a JAVA application that
runs for the short period of a user logon to our web site. It sucks all
the CPU and memory it can. It is not running as part of a web service
on our iSeries, but under QZADOINIT jobs. I speculate that this was not
properly designed and would be better suited as an RPG application.
This job is initiated from an IIS web server to our iSeries to build the
user menu upon logon. Each Web instance creates a new QZDAOINIT
connection and JAVA instance on the iSeries so it does not take
advantage of the multithreading capability of JAVA.

I have yet to understand why the programmer used JAVA for this
application.

I can see if you are writing software to sell and need to support
Windows, Unix, Linux, and the iSeries, JAVA could help you to write it
once. Being that this company is married to the iSeries and we write
for our own use, we do not necessarily need to use a language for it's
multiplatform capacity. JAVA does offer some advantages but is not the
language for all.

When we first started parsing XML, we used a JAVA XML parser. Very slow
but was easy to download and implement. Since then I have found and
installed service program for XML parsing that is written in C and very
easy to use. It runs circles around the JAVA version as far as the way
our application runs to parse a single XML file or create a single XML
file. We even have it in our transaction parsing program where our web
servers pass the unformatted data back to the iSeries for processing.

I guess there is a place for JAVA, just not the way we are using it.

Chris Bipes
Director of Information Services
CrossCheck, Inc.