Re: Elevator speech on DB2 development and web enablement?

Hi Nathan,

So it might help if you were to share more background about what

prompted the questions...

Okay. Here's the background. My managers have asked me to take a look at
Node on the IBM i. All of our web and mobile apps are currently written in
.NET and access our IBM i using the .NET provider. So I know that I'm going
to hear three questions from the .NET developers:

1. Why do we need Node? We can do everything we need to do with the .NET
provider.
2. Why would we want to do things two different ways? Even if we adopt
Node, we have far too much invested in .NET to get rid of it any time in
the foreseeable future.
3. Why not just learn .NET? By the time you learn Node and everything else
you need for a Node production environment, it would have been just as easy
to learn .NET.

These are challenging questions. But I don't think they are the only
questions to consider. One of the questions I want to raise is this: Where
do we want to position our IBM i servers in a future of web and mobile
development? Right now, we don't develop web apps or RESTful services that
run on the IBM i, and we don't run any web servers on the IBM i. Do we want
to leverage our IBM i servers to run web apps, RESTful services, and web
servers? Or are our IBM i servers going to just be used as database servers
at the very back end of our web and mobile apps?

And thus the motivation for my questions: If our IBM i servers *do* remain
database servers at the very back end of our web and mobile apps developed
with .NET, does it make sense to train our IBM i COBOL developers to be
very proficient at data-centric development with DB2? If our IBM i servers
are primarily database servers, then do we want to make data-centric
development with DB2 a top priority on our IBM i servers? What would this
actually mean? And would it have any implications for the .NET web and
mobile apps that access our IBM i servers?

I'm hoping for the best (adopt Node) but planning for the worst (our IBM i
servers are used only as database servers at the very back end of web and
mobile apps).

Thanks,

Kelly Cookson
IT Project Leader
Dot Foods, Inc.
1.217.773.4486 ext. 12676
kcookson@xxxxxxxxxxxx

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