I view MS.Net as a very palpable threat to IBM i. It began as folks started
looking for modernization tools, then evolved as Microsoft gathered migration
consultants and vendors under their Midrange Alliance Program, then further
strengthened partnerships under a new organization called Enterprise Platform
Modernization. They're organized and equipped, they're on the war path, they're
taking ground.
http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh092710-story02.html
I'd like to see that trend reversed. From an architecture perspective, refer
back to my analogy of the restaurant serving customers from a soda fountain,
then later inserting what amounts to little more than a staging area in between
customer tables and the soda fountain, which causes a bottleneck, adds latency,
wastes resources, costs more, destabilizes the operation, and negatively impacts
customer service.
http://archive.midrange.com/web400/201010/msg00033.html
But it doesn't do any good to complain about the problem. We need to be able to
offer a solution. We're doing our part by developing and offering new products
for schools, which are entirely IBM i based. I think there's real opportunity
to retake lost ground by offering better applications, and ones that not only
perform core functions, but ones that also bring back auxiliary functions like
document management, approval & routing, data warehousing, business
intelligence, dashboards, web portals, electronic data exchange, GUI reporting,
etc. under IBM i. We're either building now, or planning on building that type
of functionality into core applications. I think there is good opportunity to
simplify and streamline operations, and offer better customer service.
-Nathan
----- Original Message ----
From: Aaron Bartell <aaronbartell@xxxxxxxxx>
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Fri, October 8, 2010 7:10:44 AM
Subject: [WEB400] Microsoft .NET frontending IBM i
I thought I would change the subject of the email since we have split from OT.
Concerning SQL server, yes, many times it will start out that they
will use tables on DB2, but then they realize that their tools don't
work as seamlessly with DB2 as they do with MSSQL. And the creep of
MSSQL starts and before you know it there is a nightly push of table
data from one DB to another.
In fact IBM has always proposed a 2 iSeries scenario when going to the web
I would guess that is from the Websphere App Server folks - yes, I
could see why they would do two servers - they are from the same line
of thinking as the Microsoft camp. You only need two servers if your
High Availability requirements mandate it. Otherwise IBM is just
looking to get more money in their pocket.
You can also use Apache to host .Net just as easily as PHP, JSP, etc.
Yes, but not on IBMi unfortunately, unless you want to go the route of
Mono - but I don't know if that is a place I want to go.
You can also use and take advantage of CGIDEV2/IWS and I imagine RPG-XML
services from ASP.Net so really all the service communications can be done via
ASP.Net or by calling into the i.
Agreed. But why not just keep all that processing on IBM i with RPG
and NOT have to double many of the things I originally mentioned.
Would you agree that having .NET (and corresponding servers) AND RPG
(and corresponding servers) is more complex than just having one or
the other? That is the point I am trying to make - but a lot of
people just dismiss that as "the cost of doing business" and don't
give it ample consideration.
ASP.Net scales probably just as well as the other methods you guys have been
throwing about. However I haven't done any millisecond thread clocking :-)
Of course that would all be entirely relative. Sure I could have 30
VMWare instances to facilitate the same processing power of a larger
IBM i, but why would I want to? In my mind there is a blatant scaling
issue when you can't scale by adding processing power to a single OS
instance and instead need to spread it across many OSes. Smells like
that platform wasn't ever really meant for what it was built for and
it is now just a hyped band-aid process called VMWare. FWIW, you
don't create an IBM i LPAR for the same reasons you create a Windows
VMWare, so I think your comparison is a bit unbalanced.
By disadvocating (Is that a word :-) ) Windows you're really setting people up
to try and live in a bubble that no longer exists, which is the iSeries all by
itself.
So are you saying you can't do an entire, and modern looking, business
application on IBM i using only RPG and CGI? Note I haven't started
talking about email servers and the like (which IBM i is terrible at
btw, unfortunately).
Interesting enough EXTJS works just as well and simply with RPG, PHP, JSP and
ASP.Net. Keep evangelizing that because EXTJS is a cool framework.
Absolutely true! (glad we agree on something) What's even better is
that in many cases you can go down to a more raw form of
ASP.NET/PHP/JSP and not include all the extra layers and still get
excellent looking code that is easy enough to maintain. For example,
this program could have been written in any *single* server side
language just as easy:
http://red.rpg-xml.com/oru11/dspf/custmaint.html
I guess in the end what I disagree with is that many think you NEED
Microsoft on the front end to produce nice looking modern applications
in a timely manner for IBM i/RPG shops, and that simply isn't true.
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
http://mowyourlawn.com/blog/
midrange.com
