From: Nathan Andelin
Well, anything that replaces 5250 terminals and applications is going to
require more services, but Web technologies in general seem to be
reversing the trend to migrate workloads off the platform. If you think
the migration of applications is significant now, just turn back the clock
10 years or so to when client-server was having it's heyday. Today, a lot
of PC workloads are migrating back to servers.
Dead on here. True fat client, with its inherent distribution woes, has
proven itself to be unmanageable for all but the most focused high-end power
applications.
On the other hand, you seem to be referring to the fact that Websphere is
platform agnostic and that Websphere workloads tend to be deployed to
Linux and Windows servers. While that appears to be true, that also
appears to be the thing that's putting pressure on IBM to drop the price
and increase the performance of the I5, and at some point an equilibrium
will be reached.
Agree here, as well. By forcing IBM to remove the governor, we get to see
what a real bare-metal stack will do. I'm sure Nathan's CGI architecture,
which ran quite fine on smaller machines, screams when you give it 3800 CPW.
And in general, business rules written in RPG are going to run faster than
things written in highly layered, interpreted languages. It's pure math.
So as the CPW on the System i goes up, so does the server capacity, and it's
going to be interesting to see if the dedicated PC servers can keep up.
A more positive way of looking at IBM's server homogenization strategy and
IBM's investment in distributed architectures and developer tools that
copycat Microsoft's lead, is that it opens up opportunities for 3rd party
developers and ISV's to focus on native tools and applications that offer
distinct advantages in terms of performance, reliability, and
productivity.
Here I start to get a little lost. How is IBM copying Microsoft? IBM is
pushing Linux and J2EE, and basically preaching platform agnosticism,
whereas Microsoft continues down the road of proprietary tools. In fact, as
far as I can tell, Microsoft is mirroring IBM of 20 years ago, back in the
days of the IBM PC. Meanwhile, IBM is leading the charge on open standards.
EGL for example is a Lego type technology that's easy to use, and great to
play with, but everything you build with it will look like your last Lego
project, which is kind of boring.
And this is just plain wrong. I seem to not be getting across what EGL is.
EGL allows you to use the very powerful WDSC tools to build literally any
kind of JavaServer Faces (JSF) page you want, and then provides a simple
syntax to populate the dynamic data in those pages.
Yes, you can drop a table and it will paint it. But you can then go in and
move fields around, add them, remove them, add JavaScript, do whatever you
want. What EGL gives you is seamless plumbing back to your page handler,
where you can use high-level SQL statements or calls to an ILE program to
load the data.
However if you've taken the time to
think and learn outside the box, you'll discover that you can do some
really great and distinctive things with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and RPG.
And when users compare your applications with the ones built from Legos
(so to speak), you'll find that people are more interested in yours.
If you're calling EGL legos, you're way off base, Nathan. EGL is not legos.
EGL is primarily about the plumbing, which you're not even addressing. How
much work is it for you to attach a validation table to a field and have the
browser pop up an error next to the field if the entered value is not in the
table?
In EGL, it's a simple setting on the field. And that field can be anywhere
on the page. Not only that, you can define the field once and use it over
and over on as many pages as you need it.
Remember: EGL does not dictate the look and feel of your application. It
simply provides a quick way to drop dynamic data onto the page, and you can
then go from there wherever your imagination takes you.
Also, WDSC inherits the powerful WYSIWYG editor from Rational, which means
you can do everything from templates and auto-generated navigation menus to
complex JSF interactions using Flash and JavaScript widgets.
I just finished an article for IBM System Magazine where I took a DB2
physical file of orders and then created both a simple CRUD application over
it to enter data as well as a quick query application that displayed the
detail data in a table and summarized the data in a pie chart.
Total elapsed time? 15 minutes.
As generated it's indeed pretty cookie cutter ("lego" if you will), but what
else could it be? The important point is that it's standard JSF code and
now the designer can play with it and do whatever they want using the
WYSIWYG editor. Best of all, they can do it in a RAD session with the end
user, using real data from the real file.
Joe
midrange.com
