Re: Why use PHP? What are the disadvantages?

Comments in-line Aaron.

Jon Paris

www.Partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com


On Apr 19, 2010, at 2:13 PM, web400-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

I think the various forms of RPG+CGI have been slow to mature in the open
space (i.e. community support) compared to others, but I do think there is
adequate support out there at this point (i.e. CGIDEV2 forums,
midrange.comforums, Renaissance forum, Valence forums, RPG forums)

Sorry but compared with PHP or .Net or whatever it is still just a drop in the ocean. I wish it were otherwise.

Don't get me wrong, there will be challenges with RPG+CGI, but there will be
less of a environment change, and because of that I think the chance of long
term viability is much greater because we already know what we like and
don't like about the RPG+DB2+IBMi environment - PHP is a fairly big and
unknown world that is still a teenager in enterprise compared to IBM (the
50yr old).

If enough RPG oriented solutions deal with the stateful vs stateless issue then I might agree with you. I'd also like to run RPG on my PC or Linux box or Mac or ... but

And I don't particularly like the notion of all state being maintained be the browser. Those little buggers are still far too unreliable for that. FF is pretty stable - but somebody's RAI breaks it at least once every couple of days forcing me to at least close the tab or often the whole thing and start over with whatever I was working on.

What have you to say to that o' advocate of the devil! ;-)

To be honest (and I know you know this Aaron) - I really don't care _what_ people choose as long as they choose something to move their bottoms to the web before it is too late. There's no perfect solution. As an example - Henrik has mentioned his tooling several times here - I've looked at it. It is very powerful and looks well built but - given that despite having been doing various web apps on and off for some 15+ years now - I'm still clueless about how 90% of it hangs together and haven't the time to learn it as there are too many other options competing for my attention.

I guess I am also a long way from being convinced that we all _need_ the kind of RIA complexity that is being promoted. There are days when it seems to me that it is just a bunch of boys running around with their cool toys building stuff that nobody really needs and adding layers and layers of complexity (and therefore inherent failure) to the applications.

But then maybe I'm just feeling my age today!