From: Jon Paris
On 6-Nov-07, at 8:25 AM, Joe Pluta wrote:
I re-read that post several times, and I swear I don't see where I
said that
you said PHP was better.
That was the whole point I was trying to make. I made a simple
comment about my personal opinion on EGL and you launched into a
tirade about PHP. You are correct - I did not mention PHP - why did
you?
Come on Jon. Terms like "tirade" are inflammatory and unnecessary. In my
initial response, I said exactly two things even remotely connected to PHP:
"The Zend stuff isn't exactly plug and play."
"Heck, PHP is nearly 15 years old and was originally designed to do home web
sites and very little has happened to the language over the years."
That's it. Hardly a tirade. Anything else I said was in response to other
people's PHP comments, either yours or Aaron's.
And I still fail to see in what way an RPG-CGI app is any more open
to the internet than WAS or any other option.
With WAS, you can run the web application server on a box other than your
System i (I often call this an "appliance" to keep it short, although
Aaron's use of the term is a little more specific, referring to a box
devoted entirely to firewall and filtering). Anyway, the appliance is the
only thing open to the Internet. It in turn executes business logic on the
System i, but at no point can an external agent access the System i.
With RPG-CGI, the System i is directly attached to the Internet. Port 80
traffic is routed directly from external sources to the System i. This is a
potential hole, if for nothing else than DoS attacks. There are ways to
mitigate the risk: a true web appliance of the type Aaron spoke of, or even
carving off a separate partition on your System i for the web serving. But
you can't take the simple move of taking your web server and moving it into
the DMZ and thus isolating your production box.
I will state simply some of the basic facts that form the foundation
for my current opinion. I reserve the right to change/adjust that
opinion as time unfurls.
Thanks for your candid comments, Jon! Since you've expressed them as your
opinions, I won't argue them point by point, and of course many of them
center on the idea that the Rational team just doesn't understand or really
care about the System i.
I can't speak authoritatively to that concern, that's only IBM's purview.
But I can tell you that I have talked to lots of people throughout the EGL
hierarchy and I'm comfortable that they respect the System i community and
really want to work with them. I had dinner with a number of EGL's
strategic personnel at the Rational developer's conference, and as you might
imagine it was a rather lively night. However, I came away with the clear
idea that they understand what is needed to crack the market, and a lot of
things have happened in the intervening months to convince me that they
weren't just paying lip service.
So let the unfurling begin <grin>.
Joe
midrange.com
