For me, personally I am energized and excited by all the new technology including .Net on IBMi which was brought to the platform by a brilliant 21yr old kid who had nothing to gain or lose.
The reality though for any shop is when to bring things to bear and when not to. There are also definitely lots of anti Microsoft/.Net biases in this room.
But that's OK, I am contributing because 1.) I find it fun, 2.) I am at the stage in life where I want to give back. 3.) I'm not ready to give up bleeding edge technology to become an IT director or development manager.
So if you decide to put in a sliver of effort: Visual Studio is now FREE and if you follow my step by step instructions it's very easy to test the technology, but I totally understand that if you don't have the desire and your staff doesn't then it's not a good fit. (We all have preferences. Ala the ice cream analogy.)
IBM will also be releasing a new PASE base Client Access Driver soon which is AWESOME.
Since you seem focused on drop in apps, these don't exactly meet your criteria but they are business use cases where .Net can help quickly. And keep in mind my use cases are generally utilities to augment reality 😉
And to be fair other languages can do this too, so pick your poison. I know yours is Java.
Short Use Case List
-High speed directory crawler and disk space management. (All straight up C# or VB if you like)
-Sending and receiving email messages and processing in the IFS. (Using the Mailkit/Mimekit frameworks. Awesome stuff)
-Middleware to reach out and consume web services such as Salesforce, ServiceNow and others. (All straight up C# and maybe some things like RestSharp or Fluent.)
-Create business web services to interact with DB2 and existing RPG/CL programs quickly. (NancyFx, Qiuck and painless. I'll be posting a plug and go sample to my repo soon.)
-Extract data from DB2 to Excel for reporting and then distribute. (NPOI. A couple others but they rely on GDI which not working currently.)
-Generate PDF files on the fly for reporting from data, spool file or HTML sources.
-Create a self-contained web server without need for Apache. Could be a custom web app, CMS site or other (Again NancyFx)
-Zip and unzip files with protection (Zip#. Probably faster than any Java ZIP stuff but haven't benchmarked. Also does protected ZIP)
-Back up IBMi files and libraries and send to outside storage. (Cool utilitarian mix of IBMi commands and C#)
-Crawl and source file and export source from source members. (Cool utilitarian mix of IBMi commands and C#)
-Reach out to a Jasper Report Server, run and consume a report. (I think you still use Jasper. So this could help, although Java and others can do the same. )
-Interact with file shares. (Using smbclient. NetServer no longer required. Kerberos issues prevent using the .Net SMB stuff, but calls to PASE commands are drop dead simple.)
I'm still exploring but the uses cases on IBM i would generally be background services or system commands (that can easily be consumed from RPG, CL or COBOL) like any other CL command.
Not sure if this satisfies your need for use cases, but hopefully other can benefit and check out my presentation and Mono on i.
Bring on the C# and VB developers !!
Regards,
Richard Schoen
Web:
http://www.richardschoen.net
Email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Phn: (612) 315-1745
------------------------------
message: 4
date: Wed, 17 Apr 2019 07:42:08 -0500
from: Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: 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.? :)
midrange.com
