Re: Why use PHP? What are the disadvantages?

Analogy time!

I think IBM sees RPG as a sinking ship full of gold, and their only goal is
to get as much gold off the ship before it finally goes under. RPGOA is a
crude plug to slow the sinking so they have more time to get to the gold.

However helpful it might be in the sort term, it isn't going to save the
ship.

I think Scott may have been being a little sarcastic when he said RPGOA

is

a "screen scraper" technology, but I will let him speak for himself. You
are still generating a web UI via the medium of RPG I/O and opcodes,

which

seems less intuitive to me. I haven't seen your product or Profound
Logic's product and don't mean to belittle them. If they can be used to
re-configure existing (monolithic) heritage applications with little or

no

effort, then I do see an advantage there for companies who have neither
the time or resources to re-write their applications. As regards new
development, however, it still seems to me we could already do everything

(including session management and security) using system APIs, service
programs and procedures before RPGOA. I was using Valence merely as an
example. I'm not familiar with all the third party tools that are
available for RPG development.

My point about WYSIWYG tools and Javascript is that regardless of RPGOA,

a

RPG developer is going to have to learn one, the other or both to do web
development. RPGOA and associated third-party tools are not going to
provide a silver bullet such that developers can develop web UIs/apps in
the same manner as green screen apps and get a decent web 2.0 UI. If a
developer wants to use WYSIWYG tools, code-generators, etc., that's fine,

but then one becomes limited to/by the tool vs. doing the actual coding.
So it seems to me some forethought has to be given to how established the

tool is, what kind of backing it has in the community, etc. before a long

term investment is made. The same is true for language frameworks, but

the

popular ones generally have a much larger developer base (e.g., Zend,
Dojo, JSF, .NET, etc.) and provide more resources for trouble-shooting

and

research.

Blake