Re: Idle curiosity about EGL Cafe ...

C'mon Joe. You challenged everyone else and called them on it when they did
not take your bait. And now you try to weasel your way out of this POC
challenge with arguments that you would slam if they came from anyone else.


EGL Café is a business app. Let's see you do it.


P.S. David, it had to be done...


On 6/12/08 7:20 PM, "Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

David Gibbs wrote:

Joe Pluta wrote:

I suspect it's because the EGL Cafe isn't really a business application
- it's a forum. EGL is designed to write business applications. Sort
of the same reason midrange.com doesn't run on a midrange...

A forum is web application to access a database of messages (obviously
this is greatly over simplified). I _think_ the software they are using
(written by Jive Software, same company that writes the open source
jabber server I use) uses MySQL as it's back end database.

A forum is a web application, but not a business application. The
primary focus is the front end, it's more about presentation of textual
data, and the business rules are almost trivial... simple enough to be
written in languages like Perl and PHP. Yeah, they'd be sizzle-y, I
suppose, but in the end they wouldn't prove much.

And, FWIW, if I had the time and inclination ... I suspect I could write
a list processor and archiving system that ran on an i.

You could but I bet you won't. It's not worth the ROI. Similarly, it's
not worth the time for the EGL team to re-implement something that's
been done to death.

midrange.com
runs on Linux because there I had the hardware to run it on and software
was available to do exactly what I need.

Exactly. Right tool for the right job. Forums are commodity software,
nothing is to be learned by re-inventing that particular wheel.
Besides, unless they did one that's better than everything out there,
there is a certain segment of the community that would spend all their
time saying things like "it doesn't have feature X that phpbb has".

My point is: It would be a great proof of concept (and validation of
utility) if the EGL Cafe were written in EGL.

I have to disagree. Having EGL run a forum would appeal to you and I,
but not to people who actually but enterprise software. I'd wager that
a forum ranks very low on the list of applications most C-level
executives want their programmers to work on. Personally, I'd much
rather that IBM do exactly what it is doing: spend their resources using
EGL to integrate technologies and use those to build real applications.
Even the simple scheduler that Chris and I wrote has more business logic
in it than most forum software, and that's where I want IBM to focus.

If things continue to proceed, you'll be hearing about far more
important uses for EGL in the very near future, and it won't be hosting
blogs.

Joe