Re: Fooling around with VRPG

From: Aaron Bartell

By the way, you never answered my question: since when is 13 not nearly

15?:)

I guess you could say it is nearly 16 also ;-) Fuzzy math is great when
it benefits what you are saying I guess.

Er... okay, what numbers do YOU consider to be almost 15? <grin>

My issue with what
you have stated in relation to RPG CGI is that I haven't ever heard you
talk/digress on the topic and I am making the assumption that your
experience with it isn't as rich as it should be. I don't think you have
changed your opinion of the RPG crowd as they/we have progressed.

See, this is plain silly, Aaron. I'm the champion of the RPG programmer
extending their boundaries. For example, I wrote about Java and RPG before
just about anybody in the field.

Sure
there are still people that fit your model, but I am surprised
(pleasantly)
of how many of my customers are stepping outside of their confort zone and
moving forward with non-RPG-traditional programming (i.e. RPG CGI, my RPG
and Java tooling - over 120 downloads last month, Excel creation, PDF
creation, etc).

My point here is that RPG-CGI is NOT moving outside the comfort zone. It's
a bad architecture except in very small, specific niches.

1. An RPG-CGI program can only run on a System i host, so can not be

offloaded to another server.

Same with your RPG business logic. You make it sound like being forced to
run RPG on the System i is a bad thing. With all the advances in horse
power are we still as concerned that the median company will have troubles
running RPG CGI on their System i5?

I'm not even going to dignify that "RPG on the System i is bad" crack.
That's beneath you. I'm perhaps the most outspoken advocate for RPG on the
planet. That doesn't change the fact that from an architectural standpoint
it's still better to be able to move your server to a web appliance if
necessary. I don't think there are a lot of people out there willing to say
that System i CPU cycles are cheap; there will always be people who can't
get enough and being able to offload web serving is a great way to get extra
cycles.

You do have a valid point that especially on the low end there may be extra
cycles, at least for now. But if CPU and memory are no longer an issue,
then there's even more of a reason to move to J2EE over CGI.

2. A server running RPG-CGI is by definition open to the Internet. It

may only be port 80, but even that opens you up for DOS attacks.

Isn't that what network appliances are for Joe? Wouldn't many shops, even
if they had their Java on a Wintel server, have a network appliance in
front of it doing all of the DOS stuff for them?

It depends on the shop, I guess. Many is not all. And you're still open to
the Internet. With a separate server, you can go to a private addressing
scheme and not open any ports to the wild.

3. RPG-CGI requires templates which are never compiled. And unless you

use
certain RPG-CGI helper tools, even the templates have to be arsed every
time.

This is a valid performance point. Some vendors, like Profound Logic,
have addressed it by compiling the HTML right into the RPG object similar
to the JSP/Servlet model.

Yeah, another language and another IDE. And while I'm sure you can do
proper MVC with a little work, the examples I've seen combine business logic
and HTML in the same source member. This is NOT JSP/Servlet, by the way,
which is JSP Model 2. JSP Model 1, which has long been superseded, combines
business logic and UI in the same page. That's the same obsolete model as
ColdFusion or the various scripting languages.

The primary advantage of RPG-CGI? You don't have to learn another

language.

Just for the record I must say that this is a HUGE benefit! Not having to
entertain another language in your shop can save boat loads of time and
money. The other side is finding RPG talent which isn't the easiest thing
to do. I am hoping the IBM Acedemic Initiative's are making ground in
this area.

And I guess you don't count HTML, CSS and JavaScript as languages. Have you
even looked at EGL? The number of lines of code required to create a
working application is minimal, and while I know you don't like Java, I
think you'd be okay with EGL. It's pretty hard to NOT understand the line
"get customers". And it greatly reduces the amount of HTML coding as well.
So in effect, it's a net decrease in knowledge required over various CGI
techniques, most of which require you to be a pretty darned good HTML coder,
especially if you're trying to create input-capable forms.

The other advantage is that you don't have to have a Web Application

Server, but frankly that's a bit of a red herring, as Tomcat is no more
difficult to install and configure than Apache.

I haven't setup Tomcat on an i5 in awhile, so maybe it has become much
simpler. Does Tomcat come pre-installed on the i5 like Apache? - I know
it was back on V5R1 I believe, but then they gave it an EOL.

On the System i ... it's a copy and then run a batch file. And of course
configuring it is pretty much the same as Apache: you can either edit the
config files or use the GUI.

Can you start and stop Tomcat with STRTCPSVR and ENDTCPSVR?

There are start and stop batch files.

Joe