Re: Advice about moving to a Web-environment

If JSF is your ultimate goal then what I would recommend is putting together
a list of your shops requirements for a user interface that you would assume
JSF supports.  For instance, I just went through a stint where I had a
problem with one of the MyFaces (http://myfaces.apache.org) components not
being "enterprise ready" out of the box.  The point here is that would want
to make sure the JSF components you are looking to support paging from
tables that have millions of records.  Here are my specific posts on the
topic if anyone is interested: 

http://www.mail-archive.com/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/msg31438.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/msg31602.html

The other thing to look for is ease of prompting for lets say an item or
customer number.  A lot of cool ways to do that, but not a lot of them are
built into the core of MyFaces (if that is what you are using) and instead
you have to go out and try the "sandbox" components.  Maybe I am just
suffering from trying to use open source vs. IBM's

JSF sucks as far as having a UI designer being involved that knows nothing
of JSP tags.  A much better framework on that front is Tapestry
(http://tapestry.apache.org/).  The problem with Tapestry is that they
documentation is horrible (even though they have a decent amount of it).
They don't take the time to update all of the documentation to the latest
release (I got caught in the release from 3.0 to 4.0).  From what I can tell
the main developers are also the documenters and that leads to a lot of
assumptive documentation - very frustrating.  I eventually dropped Tapestry
once my lazy loading of Hibernate persisted objects for joined tables was
puking out and would require some serious rewiring to rectify.  

Java frameworks rock for 85% of what you need web pages to do. They give
very easy form control and oft force you into a nice MVC architecture.  The
other 15% is painful as you end up having to dig into the bowels of the
framework to figure why something isn't working.  These complex Java
frameworks make PHP, coupled with a simple forms package like PRADO
(http://www.xisc.com/), very intriguing. 

I am kind of switching horses here as a year ago I was saying that PHP
wasn't the pony to get on because I wasn't sure if it was enterprise ready.
I believe it was Nathan Andelin that made me see it in a different light and
now I think I am heading that direction also.  After all, PHP now runs
"natively" on all the OSes I would ever use (i.e. OS/400, Windows, *nix, OS
X) so what am I waiting for :-)  PHP is also used by some reputable sites
such as Yahoo (http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/1491221)

Maybe somebody could speak to any frustrations they have had with PHP.  I
have had plenty with Java web frameworks.  The reason I still like Java is
that it is an enterprise language and works on many tiers (i.e. web, micro
devices, desktop, etc) which I have had need for each tier at one point or
another.

Anyways, I am rambling now,
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com

 

-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Ewout N Boter
Sent: Thursday, December 14, 2006 1:53 AM
To: web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Advice about moving to a Web-environment

Thanks to all who have responded to my request for advice about moving to a
Web-environment. You have given me a lot of information. 

Some more information about our current position. We have already decided
that we won't follow the CGI trail nor the PHP trail. We realize that the
choice for Java, JSP, WAS Express, etcetera, will confront us with a long
and steep learning curve, but now that we are planning to leave behind the
5250-environment, we want to go all the way. 

Because we have chosen to start using Java, the products that can be used to
create Web-applications with just good old (ILE) RPG are not really
interesting to us. Those products might be useful when one wants to proceed
with small steps, but we have the ambition to make one giant leap
(paraphrasing a famous astronaut).

We already have reasonable knowledge of Java, HTML, and we are quite
familiair with WDSCi. Those prerequisites are met. Our main problem is that
we know about the tools and the technologies, but we don't know how to
really get going. (You might compare it to building a home. There's some
piece of bare ground in front of us, we have our toolbox ready, but we do
not have a detailed blueprint to actually start the construction.) Reading
your comments, I think it might be a good idea to start with an application
that only allows querying one or more tables. But I am not sure if we should
start using something like JSF right from the beginning. 
In the end, JSF might make things easier, but the drawback is that it
becomes more difficult to understand what's really happening under the
cover.

I will go through all the information you have given me once more, and in
the meantime I will try to get a simple applet running from the iSeries...

Thanks again for your advice.

Ewout
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