Re: Modernizing

On 10/18/2011 9:06 AM, Jim Oberholtzer wrote:

The CGIDEV2 tool is excellent. Easy to download, install and get running.

Having tried the Java route, I can say that it is massively complex to
get right, and except for super massive web sites that require a full
WAS server, in my opinion not worth the effort to learn unless there are
other compelling reasons to do so. In my case it was a Masters program
where I had a choice of Java or .Net. Clear choice there.

Or you can use EGL which does all that for you, using a 4GL procedural language. And can target Tomcat or WAS.

In addition to the CGIDEV2 tooling, I would suggest you look at PHP.
It's both procedural and object oriented, and easy to learn by
comparison to Java. With the Zend server you can incorporate all of the
RPG and IBM objects that you would like to with a minimum of effort. I
do work with Zend to help their customers implement PHP, but I would not
do that if I did not think it was a viable tool.

Of course the OP already has some Java experience. Which is good, because unlike PHP, Java can be used in many environments, ranging from web development to Android development. Not to mention all the neat PDF and mail and charting applications. But mobile development is huge, and you can't do client-side mobile development with PHP.

As to "easier to learn" that's an awfully loaded statement. As I've pointed out before, OO PHP looks almost identical to Java. Yeah, the old school PHP (think RPG III vs RPG IV) can be done pretty easily, but to learn OO PHP you have to basically learn Java syntax. And if you've done that, you may as well just learn Java, especially since it immediately buys you the ability to write Android applications!

Take a look at TIOBE (www.tiobe.com). See what's going up and what's going down. You'll see that mobile development tools like Objective-C and Lua are rising (even JavaScript is starting to make a bit of a comeback thanks to great frameworks like Dojo), while pure scripting tools like PHP, Python, Ruby and Perl are fading.

Joe