Re: opinions - utilizing more of what the i has to offer

On Jan 31, 2020, at 11:05 AM, Jay Vaughn <jeffersonvaughn@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

so our shop is an old traditional rpg shop supporting a fairly large mostly green screen product.
it has a crappy screen scraping GUI on it I won't get into.

though we do have a hosted version in a SAAS model.

Our "senior IT leadership" is not of a mainframe/midrange background.

Our company recently started doing webservices for our clients, using powerhub (and I'm not sure what else), but I do THINK it could be more efficiently integrated right into our IBM i applications and database with the use of say IWS (or a http web server) and using RPG/yAJL. I've done it before at other shops.

So when I presented them (senior leadership) with this link...
https://www.ibmsystemsmag.com/Power-Systems/01/2020/rest-and-sql?utm_content=112727421&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin&hss_channel=lcp-6225
and a comment from me saying...
"I know powerhub is all the rage but the i and your existing IBM i talent can do it all."

they responded with...

"Yep, but the cost is much more than a cheap Linux OS running it on a PC with a 10 year-old processor and low memory! Also this way it works with ProductABC too! ;-) "

and

"while i truly am an i advocate in this case I have to agree with him ... heck I'm running Linux on a 15 year old Pc with no problems ... using linux makes it easy to add additional virtual or physical servers and do load balancing across the server pool ... "

I replied with...
"You guys certainly know your hardware better than I... but I don't see where hardware even comes into the picture.
You simply configure a web services server on the current hosted IBM i. Now our IBM i apps and IBM ilocal webservices (written in RPGLE or SQL) can be invoked via http, directly on the i with programming by i developers who know the database and programming already. I've proofed this out before and had a working model on our DEV server once upon a time.
What cost? And... this way works with anything able to consume or provide a REST webservice. We can return any modern data-interchange format (xml, json)."


so, i'd like to hear the opinions on this board. I know what the i can do, but I'm not sure what exactly they are talking about. Can anyone weigh in on what they seem to be dead set on and what cost they are referring to?

tia

Jay