Hello Nathan,
Am 03.01.2020 um 01:40 schrieb Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>:
When you advocate for 5250, you're advocating for a terminal emulator on the client and "interactive" sessions on the server.
Yes.
In most cases you're advocating for SEU and PDM (or their RDI equivalents).
Maybe. There are other alternate approaches, outside SEU and outside Windows. Personally, I'm using vim with syntax highlighting rules and it's capabilities to "open" ftp URLs, in a terminal, on Linux.
You're generally advocating for RPG as a language.
Wrong assumption. RPG as I know it today (not the fancy free stuff) has it's clear drawbacks, but in combination with DDS derived tables, display files and whatnot, it's an incredibly valuable combination for getting a program done very fast. They all are very tightly integrated. I bet that's not much different with all-free which I didn't learn yet.
Move to UIM panels and creating small applications is way more clumsy. From there you can also move to C with not much more inconvenience. Personally I don't like Java, because it's a resource hog in memory and it's inherent slowliness compared to other languages.
I'd bet that in most cases, the 5250 advocates have NOT seriously explored alternatives. Therefore, they don't know how to create and deploy alternatives to 5250.
Speaking for me: Wrong. But also I'm really not a typical AS/400 guy. My first contact with serious computers was with the Macintosh. From there I have a strong opinion towards consistent and easy to use UIs. Next I had a short excursion into PCs, Novell Netware, and Windows 3.1. After that I was digging into Linux (as a server platform) which stayed my profession for now 25 years. I'm tinkering with my AS/400 for just 10 years, sometimes more and sometimes less intense.
And honestly, it's sometimes hard to focus your brain onto new and unknown stuff to learn when you're busy during the day keeping customer's stuff running. This is to be meant as an explanation. Not an excuse.
Caution, heresy follows…
That said, be assured, that I *have* knowledge to create and deploy alternatives to 5250, roughly. But as I asked before: Why on i? I don't see a point in the clumsiness and apparent lack of completeness of PASE as trying to be a true Unix environment, running applications designed and written on Unix/Linux. In the end, there is a mess of stuff done in PASE (PHP and Java comes to mind) and stuff from the CL world (wrkjobscde vs. crontab) which doesn't help with keeping an overview.
There are a multitude of tools, frameworks and whatnot in the internet but if IBM doesn't port them to this mixed mode environment, virtually nobody does. I also point back *again* to the guy trying to update OpenSSL to the most current version in PASE. No avail.
Why on i? For webby stuff, Linux made the snail race, silently and left IIS behind many years ago. To me, Unix is *the* platform for webby stuff. IBM even ported DB/2! So, why on i?
I know I'm really alone with this view on this list as a staging area of Midrange fans/admins/programmers. In the outside world, this question has been asked before many times. Why on i? With a multitude of huge licensing costs, every year anew? Reliability? You can run Linux for POWER in an LPAR, same hardware, with less cost. Linux *is* less stable than i but it's also a *lot* more flexible (and has rebooted in a fraction of time compared to i).
Why not using AIX then, if someone truly wants to stay with IBM? Interesting that IBM itself is advocating Linux all around and bought RedHat lately. AIX itself is there but also not actively pushed, similar to IBM i.
IBM i was designed as a database machine and Unix was designed as general purpose OS. IBM i is obviously a niche solution and it will stay there. The main thing which keeps it alive is people making a living by converting existing stuff to the browser, on i. Don't get me wrong, it's not bad to make a living from this but to advocate this PASE-CL mess as "modern stuff" doesn't get my acceptance.
And the user as the ultimate reason to convert to web stuff couldn't care less as long as he can do his work.
The only thing I can imagine is that the data is already on the i, "business logic" is already there, in the database or RPG code. To port all that stuff to a separate system would mean a lot of more labour.
Have you learned HTML, CSS, and JavaScript? Do you understand a browser's DOM (document object model), and do you know how to reference it from JavaScript? Do you know how to configure the IBM i HTTP server? Have you explored HTTP options for managing user authentication, authorization, access to menu items, and sessions?
From advanced Database programmers to advanced Web Designers and programmers. Now *that* is a change in direction! I wonder when the full-stack hype will arrive in IBM i. SCNR… :-)
:wq! PoC
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