Re: EGL, Java and PHP

Difficult to be specific, most problems occurred a number of years ago. Recent problems happened in two products of mine.

1. A back up product that used the Java zip class to compress savefiles into files in the IFS. It is about 7 years old. A recent Java update has caused this to fail. I still need to fix this, probably with the 'tar' process.

2. I have a product called Fortress/400. A system i security product. This maintained a cache of objects in memory to avoid excessive repetitive I/O and to avoid the requirement for files to be permanently open. Somewhere a Java update caused this to fail ( a hash table problem I think). To avoid creating different versions for different customers on different i5/OS releases and PTF levels I removed all Java. The cache was replaced by a series of user spaces, user indexes, and RPG service programs. This is more reliable and faster.

In problem 2. above, I originally used Java because it was easier and had a shorter development time. In hindsight perhaps I should have stayed with RPG.

I agree that Java is good language when one gets to know it, and can be quite productive. It is the unreliability over the long term I have issues with. I find it quite disconcerting that software I created that has worked flawlessly for several years, suddenly fails for some unexpected reason over which I have no control.

Syd

Thorbjoern Ravn Andersen wrote:

Dr. Syd Nicholson skrev:

Agreed, I like to limit myself to just two languages. RPGLE and JavaScript.
Using IceBreak on the System I. At the moment I have no need for anything
else.

I did learn Java, and have created a number of Java applications, but the
biggest problem I have found is unreliability. A few years after writing the
software that contains Java, the customer upgrades to a new Java version and
the entire application fails because in the meantime something has been
deprecated, then removed.

This is extremely interersting. Could you elaborate a bit on which things were deprecated and removed, as my personal experience is that Sun is close to hysterical about deprecating but not removing. Perhaps some third party library?

I dropped Java, JSP, Apache, TomCat, etc. when IceBreak came along. And now
I have no incentive to change back. Life is much, much simpler.

I've found Java to be somewhat a super tanker (big ship hauling oil). You need a lot of effort to get started, but when you are up to speed you can get REALLY much done without much additional effort.

How much work would it be for example to create a scalable, standards compliant web service which serves images, pdfs and excel sheets dynamically from contents in a database table?