Re: Advice about moving to a Web-environment

[Alfredo Delgado <adelgado@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm very happy with the performance of PHP on the i5. We're on V5R3 and 
I'm presently working on moving our corporate website to the i using a 
Free content management system written for PHP and MySQL.

My first impression of PHP back when it was at version 3 is that it's 
like writing C code that Apache can understand -- it's a better analogy 
on a LAMP stack where PHP runs as an Apache module. Since then PHP has 
continued to mature and incorporated some powerful string parsing 
Perl-like commands and better OO functionality.

The ease of accessing the DB will depend on how familiarized the 
programmers are with SQL and the quality of the schema being worked on. 
In my work on the i5 I have found instances of too little normalization 
and too much normalization or a record level mindset instead of a 
relational set mindset. However, if your RPG programs are as well 
modularized as it sounds, you can register them as external stored 
procedures and use ODBC to call them.

I think a point worth mentioning on web development is that it's based 
on standards. Do yourself, your users and the WWW a favor and 
familiarize yourself with XHTML 
(http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/html6/index.html) and don't just sling 
some tags and see if it looks acceptable when parsed on Internet Explorer.

Thanks,
Alfred

albartell wrote:

> 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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