Re: How hard is Java, really?

From: Dave Odom

I don't know if you've been looking at my questions on here but what's
your opinion:

Well, I'm at a cross-roads, and, generally, I like to move forward. So
what language do you suggest for building web apps as rapidly as possible
but in a language with a good solid extensible architecture, decent tools
for development, accesses DB2/400 in a high-performance way, using stored
procedures or straight calls and doesn't use ODBC? Or is there such a
thing for the i5?

Dave, I haven't been responding directly to your posts because you are so
adamantly anti-RPG, and I consider RPG to be the best language available for
writing business logic for DB2 data. Since any architecture I propose has
RPG as its core (or perhaps COBOL, especially for those shops coming from
the mainframe world) I just didn't think my input would help you.

Your desire to have high-performing non-ODBC access is exactly what RPG
does. I suppose you can do a poor second by using the record-level access
functions within Java (and I get the impression that PHP might do the same).
Your only other options on the System i are native C and C++, or else some
sort of ODBC-like access.

Since I have WebSphere on our i5, it seems as though I might be somewhat
set up to do Java which is what I perceive a your favorite Web language.
If I'm correct in my assumption about Java, how's the fastest, bestest way
to get started and do some RAD in a testing environment first.

To be more precise, my favorite architecture is a thin JSP layer connecting
to an RPG back end. The majority of Java code in my preferred architectures
is the generated code from the JSPs, with a relatively small amount of
framework code to support them.

If you go pure Java, you can use IBM's toolbox to access DB2 data either
using standard JDBC (which technically doesn't use ODBC, but instead uses a
Type 4 driver but the implementation is quite similar) or you can use the
record-level access (RLA) functions, which emulate the standard CHAIN, SETLL
and READE types of processing we use in HLL languages on the System i.

If you go down that route, WDSC is a very powerful RAD environment, with a
WYSIWYG JSP designer and a built-in WebSphere Test Environment that allows
you to set breakpoints all throughout your web application. In my opinion
it's the best testing environment for web application development.

Joe