Re: Mono on IBM i - Porting Mono to AIX and IBM i

On 4/17/2019 1:48 AM, John Yeung wrote:

But as much as you want a simple, pat answer, I don't think it's as
simple as that, because to take the best advantage of a library, it's
helpful to be able to do at least a little bit of programming in the
implementation language, because most libraries don't have a
ready-made interface to CL or RPG.

Yeah, that's what I was afraid of.  And that means I have to have a development environment, and to go that route I have to decide whether the ROI is there.  I can call Java directly from RPG.  If you use the Rational development tools, you have everything you need to develop Java.  PHP is also available, and it's still a relatively low-cost entry point.  I can add Eclipse PDT to my existing Rational toolkit and away I go.  My guess is I need Visual Studio to do even simple development for Mono, so that's a pain point right there.  I could be wrong though, and that would make a difference.

I've asked very specifically for what would help my shop: pre-written
libraries that would help make my existing RPG applications better.

No, you actually never mentioned that before now. Here are some of the
things you've asked:

brief list of the top 5 benefits of .Net over all of the other options we have on the IBM i
What about the .Net environment intrinsically benefits me as a developer? Why would I (Joe Pluta) want to take the time to broaden my .Net skills?
What I'm looking for are some concrete examples of applications that I, as the manager of a traditional IBM i shop, might want that .Net does better than other tools.
All I want is five applications written in .Net that I can drop onto my IBM i that will make my business better
applications that are easier to implement via .Net or simple unavailable elsewhere

Those are all direct quotes. None of them mentions RPG. One of them
even asks (essentially) why you would want to *develop* in .NET (even
though later you seem to take that off the table).

Yeah this is where I'm going to call "nitpick" John.  :)  What did you think I was talking about?  Wanting to develop standalone microcontroller applications?  Or perhaps write a graphical MMORPG to run on the i?  The overwhelming majority of work on the IBM i is business work written in RPG (and some COBOL).  So all I was looking for was the direct utility of Mono in that environment. Just add "in an RPG application environment" to the end of every one of my questions. :)

I'm not unsympathetic to your situation. I'm kind of unsympathetic to
the way(s) you've been asking your question, though. ;)

If you are that crunched for time, I think it should be you who is
telling us what you need or want, not us telling you what we have on
offer.

Not so much, because I'm not looking to implement YAL.  But I have the utmost respect for Richard's abilities, so when he presented the option, I just wanted to give him an opportunity to provide some examples of things that make IBM i applications better.  And to his credit he did that - NancyFx is a pretty cool framework, and I can see where it might have some general utility throughout the business application community.

So I was just looking for 5 examples of how .Net would make a IBM i business application better.  I wasn't going to second guess them, I just wanted to see what Mono brought to the table and why the folks who are high on it think it could help us lowly business developers.

Anyway, it's already taken a whole lot of time and I'm tired of re-explaining myself.  I really was just trying to give Richard a free pass to point some concrete positive benefits of Mono, and now I'm sorry I did.  No good deed goes unpunished.  :)