On Sun, Jul 2, 2017 at 11:35 PM, Booth Martin <booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Does adding in that our chosen platform has the ILE environment give us
flexibility and choices that other platforms can not provide?
Not particularly. The ILE environment is nice, but it is more or less
equivalent in flexibility and capability as the classic programming
model present on Unix and similar systems. Namely, source code in
various programmer-facing languages is compiled into "object code"
(basically the same thing as ILE modules) and object code can be
linked into executable programs. An ILE service program is more or
less equivalent to a classic Unix "shared object" or a Windows DLL.
I cannot speak to whether the technology of ILE is significantly
superior to gcc from the Unix world, but from an application
programmer's point of view, the ILE environment is at most a mild
improvement over gcc. Newer programming models like the Java Virtual
Machine, the .NET platform, and others, are significantly more
flexible than ILE.
I guess the most notable thing that ILE has that other environments
lack is a very tight integration with a database. I hesitate to call
this an "ILE-specific" feature, because this is actually just a
carryover from pre-ILE versions of the IBM midrange platform.
Come to think of it, while lots of folks like to call IBM i an
"object-based operating system", I think "database operating system"
might be an even better term for it.
John Y.
midrange.com
