Re: Tool to Modernize IBMi Screens into GUI

My company develops information systems for public schools, districts, and
state offices of education, which run natively on IBM i. We've managed to
gain a niche in a market that is dominated by multi-million dollar and in
some cases multi-billion dollar publicly traded software companies. In
order to gain a foothold in the market, our applications have had to exceed
our competition in terms of user interface, functionality, performance,
cost, and stability. Otherwise, you just don't get to introduce new
applications into such a mature market. The competition is too fierce.

There are a lot of comments in this thread that provide good insights.
However, I would steer clear of all of the "tooling" mentioned here if
you're interested in deploying broadly scoped business applications that
might need to scale to tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of
concurrent users.

Angular is an interesting paradigm, in that the entry-point into your
applications is a single static HTML page, which after the page is
downloaded from the server, the framework makes asynchronous call-backs to
the server to fetch HTML fragments known as templates and fetch JSON data,
which is then merged with the HTML templates to update the user interface,
and by creating new DOM objects dynamically. I personally couldn't stand
using Angular because the Model-View-Controller paradigm implemented in the
framework is profoundly geeky to the point that you lose touch with
reality. Also, the idea of a client-side framework that manages locally
stored datasets and locally stored UI components is unnecessary for IBM i
developers.

Angular was created to shift more workloads to the client, to avoid the
bloated, inefficient, unscalable server interfaces that plague most server
platforms other than native IBM i interfaces. It's just a fact that
mainstream server platforms are bloated, inefficient, and poorly scaling,
relative to native IBM i interfaces. They require something like 20-100
times more compute resources to handle HTTP requests than native IBM i
interfaces. Our application interfaces handle more workload on a single IBM
i server than our competition can handle on server farms of 20+ servers.

My advice would be to meet with someone who is successfully developing
business systems on IBM i, and find out how they're doing it.