Re: Truly later thinking...Honey, grab me another beer

Man, that was well written. You should send that to IBM and teach them how
to market native stuff! If it wasn't for the potential lack of support I
would actually consider check it out more. Makes you wonder if enough
people picked it up if IBM would reinvigorate the tool/language?

In the end what you have said also rings true on the RPG front. Because of
it's lack of dev environment complexity it doesn't need tons of additional
plugin software to run or deploy.

How does Net.Data handle sessions? Are there ****CGI jobs waiting to be
invoked in SBS QHTTPSVR? Do they have separate jobs from Apache? If an RPG
program is invoked for a request, is it still "activated" for subsequent
requests (like how RPG CGI works)? Sorry if this has already been brought
up.

Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com

On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 11:40 AM, Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

From: "Haas, Matt
At this point, I don't know why anyone would want to start new
development in Net.Data.

Let me admit that the lack of traction is a valid concern. But that could
change quickly if IBM chose to commercialize it, or help establish an
open-source community around it. Like any product, it needs someone
promoting and supporting it.

If you just consider Net.Data architecture and features, there's a lot
going for it. It runs in the native virtual machine and offers an
exceptional interface with native language environments. Contrast that with
products that offer a migration path off the platform. A good word-smith may
characterize them as IBM i modernization tools, but they're actually
migration tools - a good way to kill a platform.

I'm impressed that Net.Data doesn't make a "project" out of Web
development. Contrast that with tools where the first thing you do is to
make a project, and set up about a dozen different directories for your
files. Then in order to create a new file within the project the tool
offers about 6 dozen wizards for creating it. Since the tool is based on
multi-tier architecture, and offers a migration path off the platform, and
implements numerous convoluted "standards", and attempts to mitigate between
disparate interfaces, you begin to lose site of the desired result, and
begin to focus on the mechanics of implementation. When that's your view of
Web development, you begin to believe that you need the wizards and code
generators, when what you really need are simpler interfaces.

With Net.Data I'm impressed that you don't need to setup an entire
development and runtime environment on your PC. You don't need a personal
HTTP server, a personal virtual machine, a personal application server, or
12 different editors integrated into 1 IDE. You don't need a wizard to
deploy your application to a server. You don't need to make a "project" out
of setting up or upgrading your development environment. You don't need a
beefy workstation. You can make incremental changes to macros and
immediately see the results. You don't need to redeploy your entire
project.

I like the fact that with Net.Data you're dealing directly with HTML, CSS,
and JavaScript rather than working with various tag languages that generate
server and client-side components that generate HTML, CSS, and JavaScript,
but do little to improve the user interface. Instead, they lock you into
less flexible interfaces.

Net.Data performance surprised me. In my last message I provided a link to
an inquiry screen which I implemented in both Net.Data and RPG, and where
client response times were essentially identical for both versions.

Nathan.



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