Re: Advice about moving to a Web-environment

albartell wrote:

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.

Alfredo, have you played at all with the PHP to RPG interface?  I am curious
as to it's limitations (if any) and what types of extra configuration is
necessary (and then inherently what needs to be change managed).  My concern
with doing stored procs for RPG ILE is that you then have to change manage
those stored procs (which is a pain if they start numbering more than 25 or

so).

It would rock if you could call RPGILE outside of SQL without limitation (I
am guessing similar limitations to Java's PCML exist).

One of these days I am going to get around to installing PHP on the good ol'
System i5 :-)

Aaron Bartell

-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Alfredo Delgado
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2006 7:55 AM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Advice about moving to a Web-environment

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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