Re: Security for web site accessing i via IWS

On 2/3/2015 9:53 AM, Aaron Bartell wrote:

Opinion and unbridled honesty warning....

I deeply appreciate your opinion; thanks for sharing!

This approach of having such disparate teams will
significantly slow anything produced with this technology stack and the
business will immediately be at a disadvantage to the competition. The
next real competitive advantage is how fast a business can deliver features
and not just delivering "keeping up with the Jones'" technology. Everybody
has technology at this point, but not everybody can move fast because that
takes very careful selection of a technology stack.

It's my personal experience that the midrange marketplace is
conservative and intentionally late when it comes to adopting mainstream
'best practice'. Why that is should be someone's PhD thesis, but I
don't think that there are very many midrange shops in a cutthroat life
or death struggle to deliver features vis à vis the competition.

Here, our web team (.NET) call stored procedures that adopt authority.
We have up to 2 web developers and up to 2 IBM i developers who get
tasked to make changes to the web interface. Typically, the UI side is
the choke point. To date, the longest time frame to implement a
significant change has been 2 weeks. This involved a total rewrite of
the front-end authentication process. The back end involved a few
procedures and a new table; we had our part ready for testing in an
afternoon. Was 2 weeks slow? Yeah, I can agree that it seemed slow and
I can also agree that having two disparate teams helped make it slower.
But as far as our business goes, it was fast enough.

The biggest hurdle we face when it comes to choosing a technology stack
is that we (the IBM i team here) are never the drivers of that decision.
We are always the providers - the stack is chosen by someone way
upstairs with direct input from the web team. We RPG programmers aren't
really even aware of the choices available, and I don't see this
changing any time soon.