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

On 4/17/2019 8:20 AM, Richard Schoen wrote:

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.

That was a LONG time ago, Richard.  :)  These days I prefer ILE. With the explosion of DB2 services I can do a whole lot more without ever having to leave the friendly confines.  That's why I thought your news was pretty cool.  I'm just trying to see how much pain there is.  And free Visual Studio is great, but there's still installation, management and training on multiple development machines (so there's no single point of failure for all things Mono).

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.

Yes, this is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.  Excel and PDF are two biggies.  As you know we use RJS tools for some of this, but we also have a lot of custom Java for Excel generation. I don't think we're still using Jasper, but I could be wrong. REST services are a good area, although a little more nebulous. NancyFx seems to have huge potential.  Zip and mail obviously have alternatives (I use jar, for example, and SNDSMTPEMM), but I'm sure there are nuances to the Mono environments.

The trick is knowing what's available.  Then, if enough of these could make a direct impact on our environment, I can  make a pitch for the non-ROI investigative effort.  I just wanted to see if there was enough there for me to even begin the research and from what you've shown in the list above, there certainly seems to be.

So thanks for taking the time.  Now I have to see where I can find some to follow up.  :)