Re: Advice about moving to a Web-environment

Here's my thoughts.

Java/Websphere - big gulp for your developers and a big gulp for your
machine respectively.  Your RPG programmers may very well get fed up with
Java before any real useful applications are developed.  It's so bitter
sweet, because Java (i.e. JSF) has some pretty cool event driven programming
going on, but the DB access is sometimes problematic (at least mine is with
using Hibernate).  Then with RPG you don't have a nice event driven model
(i.e. you write all of the plumbing), but you have second to none ease of DB
access and you don't have a hundred and one plugins to make everything work
like you do on the Java end.

Main note: Introducing a new language into a shop is problematic on MANY
fronts so it shouldn't be taken lightly.

If you aren't afraid to spend some consulting dollars, hire Brad Stone to
write a small first iteration of an eRPG program.  You can code 100% in RPG
and make excellent reuse of your existing RPGILE business logic.  After Brad
is done he can walk you through the different aspects of the created web
program and give you 'must know' type information - saving you many hours of
spinning the wheels.  I had the pleasure of working with him on a recent web
project and it's actually enjoyable to see somebody be so efficient in
writing RPG CGI apps :-)  He can be contacted through this page:
http://bvstools.com/contact.html

Another possibility, though it would be introducing a new language into your
shop, is PHP.  If you are on V5R3 or V5R4 you should be able to get it up
and running fairly easily.  IMO, PHP is a solid language choice for web
development on a couple different fronts: 1) There are endless scripts out
there to do nearly anything you could want or need.  2) there are so many
nice "bifs" and "opcodes" built into the language so you wont frequently
find yourself writing little routines. 3) The learning curve can start out
VERY small because PHP "just works" once your server is setup.  I have found
it to be an easy language to play with.  I do not know how well it performs
on the iSeries (anybody done any testing on this?).  

But once again you will be splitting your programmers down the middle as
some WILL have PHP knowledge and some WILL NOT.  That may not seem like a
big deal now, but as time goes on it definitely will be.

Those are my thoughts.  Take them for what their worth.
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com


-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Ewout N Boter
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2006 4:35 AM
To: web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [WEB400] Advice about moving to a Web-environment

I post this message because I would like to get some advice of other people
who have made the transition from a traditional 5250/RPG-environment to a
Web/Java-environment. 

At our shop, we are only developing 5250-applications. We use ILE RPG in the
way ILE was intended for, i.e. we have created a lot of procedures to
encapsulate business rules, we use service programs, activation groups,
etcetera. Thus, we have adopted some of the modern features of ILE RPG, but
we are still stuck with 5250-applications. We now want to make the
transition to GUI- and/or Web-applications, but we don't know how to
proceed. We have bought some books about using Java on the iSeries, one of
us is doing a course on WebSphere Application Server, we have some thoughts
about a Web-application we would like to build, but we are not feeling
confident enough to really get going. Therefore, I would like to know how
other shops have made the step to modernization. I think that we might learn
a lot from the experience of others who have travelled along the way we have
ahead of us. Any response would be greatly appreciated.

Ewout
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