Re: What forum is best for a Tope and Node question?

I see.

Your original statement that Node is still " somewhat experimental" is probably not far off. Your description of the Node ecosystem makes it sound like the wild west. Like Kelly said, Profound is pushing it, but things are probably different in their vendor-supported bubble.




-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Fathers [mailto:X700-IX2J@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, March 16, 2018 10:46 AM
To: Web Enabling the IBM i (AS/400 and iSeries) <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [WEB400] What forum is best for a Tope and Node question?

Well, let's say you want to target DB2 (not just on the i) then there are a number of DB2 drivers, none of which appear to be officially supported, the most popular one seems to be "ibm_db", however, this doesn't support the retrieval of metadata from a stored procedure call, which is necessary if you wish to communicate back to the webservice caller the types and sizes of the parameters and result set columns. IBM do have a native driver I think, which I suspect does allow metadata retrieval, but this then means you have to run your NodeJs server on the IBM i and can't develop it locally and get all the benefits you get on the PC, like a reloading development server when the code changes and a nice debugger (I've not tried using a remote debugger on IBM Node, which might make debugging a bit less painful). In Java EE, I can develop on my PC in the IDE, run a Tomcat instance locally and use a local copy of DB2, MySQL or whatever, or even point to my IBM i just by providing the right JDBC driver and connection options - my code stays exactly the same. This also means that simply by providing different DB connection resources in TomEE the same webservice can execute SPs on completely different databases seamlessly.

Coming back to Node, if you look up drivers for SQL Server, for example, there don't seem to be any officially supported ones. Furthermore, the APIs for each driver are often completely different so you have to write specific code for each database, or worse still, driver that you wish to use. Also, TomEE has a build in database connection pooling facility, in Node on the other hand, some drivers have it, some not, then you have to find your own pooling solution.

If anyone knows better or I've missed something obvious I'd love to know, as I said, I'd prefer to rewrite my framework in Typescript and run it under Node then I have all the code under one roof as it were, but it just doesn't seem that straightforward.



________________________________
From: WEB400 <web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of Justin Taylor <JUSTIN@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: 16 March 2018 15:45
To: Web Enabling the IBM i (AS/400 and iSeries)
Subject: Re: [WEB400] What forum is best for a Tope and Node question?

" unfortunately and relational database support in Node is a little bit poor in general"

Can you elaborate? I have a proof-of-concept Node app running natively that accesses Db2 & SQL Server. It seemed to work OK for me.