Re: Recommendations of web developmentarchitecture/tool for diverse i5 access...

On 5/31/07, albartell <albartell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I think recommendations have to be made based on the needs and existing
infrastructure of a company. With that said and being this is a list where
I am guessing everyone has an System i5 in house, Brad's recommendation for
RPG CGI is quite valid. Going the RPG CGI route (for an RPG shop) allows
them to cash in on existing knowledge and hardware investments (talking many
hundreds of thousands of dollars even for a shop with only 5 developers).

What advantages does ASP.NET 2.0 have over RPG CGI for a shop with a wealth
of RPG knowledge? I think when people make recommendations of ASP.NET they
don't realize how much change needs to take place to facilitate enterprise
level computing (read solid business apps).

coupling asp.net with customized socket connections to your system i5
can make for a great way to server web content from your i5. asp.net
wants disconnected data sets with which to bind to its various flavors
of server controls. Disconnected as in your asp.net code connects to
the server, tells it what data it wants, then receives that data and
disconnects. The server being connected to in our case being a socket
connection ( for high speed ) to a customized program on the i5. (
and of course it can use db2connection to connect direct to the db2
database of the i5 )

what asp.net offers are user written server controls which are nuggets
of html rendering functionality that are dropped on the web page and
run, sub procedure like, without the involvement of other code and
controls on the same page. A login control or a navigation bar are
good examples.

The code for this sort of thing can get complicated what with classes,
events, properties, view state, delegates, base classes, interfaces,
etc. But the alternative of all sorts of dependencies in your code
is theoretically more problematic. I am interested to know what the
PHP equivalent of the server control is.

One advantage to using asp.net over rpg-cgi is your programmers get to
learn C# !

-Steve