Re: CGI programming

Comments in-line Nathan.

Jon Paris

www.partner400.com <http://www.partner400.com/>
www.SystemiDeveloper.com <http://www.systemideveloper.com/>

On Nov 27, 2018, at 2:14 PM, Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:

John,

Jon actually but I'll assume you meant me.

When people dismiss run-time performance concerns, I always image them
working on small-scale development for small-scale organizations. Is that a
valid assumption on my part, in regard to your last comment?

No. But please note that I said PHP did not perform as well as RPG. I was only casting doubt on the "it's 20x worse" claim which I have found not to be true.

My own system (System i Developer) does not have to handle huge workloads. But I've worked with customers that have massive volumes and I'm sure Alan Seiden could give you some examples.

We recently developed an IBM i based student transportation system for a
public school district that hosts applications and data for 80K students,
parents, teachers, administrators, etc. They indicated that their student
information system (written in Java, which according to some benchmarks
performs better than PHP), requires a server farm of 20 systems, consisting
of something like 80 cores. If they were using our system (written in RPG),
I'd recommend a single 8-core Power server, which would save them a lot of
time that is required to manage their current server farm.

No argument. I have found PHP to be comparable or faster than Java but again - I never said that either performed as well as RPG. Also if using Apache (which I would be for PHP) the IBM i itself handles the scaling of a large system much better than most other implementations. The Java would not gain that benefit to the same extent.

You keep alluding to PHP productivity, which I assume is in regard to the
phpGrid utility that you promote. But I wouldn't generally consider PHP to
be more productive than RPG, in most coding contexts.

I don't think I _keep_ alluding to anything of the sort. I have said that the availability of a variety of libraries gives me options in PHP (Python, or whatever) that I simply don't have with RPG. You are in a unique situation because you have built the tooling you need to be able to build and deploy apps in your arena quickly. I'm not in that position. My clients range from Health industry to transport to retail to ...

More significantly I am often dealing with people who have no web presence (on the RPG side) and zero experience of building web apps. My focus is on helping them to get a POC up and running quickly so that they begin to know the questions they should be asking - both of themselves and their users.

As to PHPGrid - I wouldn't have said my mentions constitute "promoting" but whatever. It is a tool. Check back over the archives and you'll see I've also mentioned WOW and any number of free and for-fee tools that can help people get stated quickly. I mentioned PHPGrid recently for a very specific task where the OP needed a simple database CRUD tool. I'm pretty sure I mentioned WOW and Giovanni's tools as well in response to the same request.

As to "more productive" - sorry but unless and until you have an RPG-based framework in place (and sadly Renaissance has disappeared) then, because of readily available frameworks and components, I find PHP more productive than rolling it by hand using (say) CGIDEV2 or powerExt.

I really don't think you can compare your personal experience of building RPG-based apps - based on years and years of building your own "framework" - with the situation that a newbie finds themselves in.


Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com