Re: 'green screen' not sellable -- MIDRANGE-L

This is one of those things that is more true in theory then in fact.
The i has always been sold under the premise that you only need one box
and every shop I can think of always has a slew of windows boxes.

C# provides a lot better support for connecting and using disparate data
sources IMHO. Things like linq are a godsend. In my (admittedly
limited) experience with the i, it has a lot of trouble integrating from
other sources. Other sources are a fact of life as the average shop is
going to have quite a few different databases. When I say other sources
I mean connecting to a json service, reading xml files, reading a foxpro
database, etc. I know the i can do at least some of that stuff but it
is so ... painful.

Now imagine for a moment you have a mobile application. If you use a C#
WCF service as an intermediary you can preprocess all of the data and do
any and all transformations from any number of data sources (because
.net does that stuff *really* well). You can use an ORM library like
entity framework and then you pass the benefit of that object oriented
access right through to the other end.

Finally all of your data processing and access takes place over high
bandwidth wired lines and then the final result only is sent over
wifi/wlan. the whole thing ends up being faster even though there is
another layer. It also adds another layer of security and isolation
between your core business data and the nasty world of the internet.

For me developer productivity is paramount as they are the most
expensive part of the process. The hardware is cheap anymore.
Leveraging the existing i developers in a way they feel comfortable with
while simultaneous making use of new generation .net developers in an
environment they feel comfortable with just makes sense.

But I speak more from the ideals of a shop that needs to be incredibly
flexible and reactive for in-house needs. Not a shop that is developing
a boxed application for resale. In that case it becomes more sellable
by requiring only one system I'd think. But even so, you might warm
some shops up with the whole "we're modern and integrated" aspect.

Mark

On 06/08/2015 12:45 PM, Scott Klement wrote:

IMHO, they are not thinking this through clearly.

If the goal is to have a web interface, there are many (hundreds) of
ways to do that purely on IBM i. Why would you want to introduce a C#
interface and a Windows server to the mix? Now you have to maintain two
platforms all the time. This increases the expense and complexity of
maintaining your application tenfold.

Granted, if your goal is to not use IBM i at all (eliminate the database
and backend issues so it's purely on Windows, or is cross-platform --
though C# will not likely make it cross-platform) then there's some
advantages to that approach -- mainly that it opens you up to a wider
range of customers. But, you will also be open to a much stronger
competition. And you will have more problems with things like
reliability that bring with them a lot of hidden costs.

If you like IBM i and just want a web interface, why not do the web
stuff on IBM i instead of Windows?

There's nothing web-based you can do on Windows that you can't do just
as easily and just as well on IBM i. RPG can do web as well as any other
language. <vendor>I work for a company that is in this business.. see
message from Brian May</vendor> Even if you don't want to go with a
commercial package, though, RPG can do web well with CGIDEV2 (if you
don't mind coding it), or many traditional web environments are
available such as Java, PHP, Ruby and Node.js.

IMHO, this attitude of "IBM i can only do green screen" comes from
working with programmers who are 20 years behind the times and unwilling
to try anything new. Fire those people, they are holding you back.

On 6/8/2015 9:36 AM, Hoteltravelfundotcom wrote:

I was talking Friday with an owner of a company that has billing software
for a particular industry.
Where there are frequent, government and insurance changes they have to
apply.

Their software is based on RPG. He said they want to rewrite in C#
because
they cannot sell to new customers.
OK fair enough but do you think C# based is the way to go? Secondly he
said
that they will keep the data on the IBM I.

Actually I have been working with mobile apps lately connecting a desktop
system using Delphi and I was thinking this might be a better way for
them
to get their product to the public relatively sooner. Taking a
complicated
old database from ibm I and trying to fit in C# I think it hard but what
are their choices?