Simon Coulter wrote:
That's just marketing fluff and only works while you have a need for
OS/400 applications.
I partially agree with you. It's not really "fluff" -- but you're
completely right that it only works while you have a need for OS/400
apps. You'll never bring new customers to the box by saying "look, we
can do what AIX can do!"
However, there are situations where I can get software in PASE/QShell
that I can't solve without them unless I want to build it from the
ground up. For small, niche things this makes sense to me. It's not
profitable to create something for i if there are only a handful of
potential customers. Having the ability to bring in code from a more
mainstream platform solves this problem. For things that are more
mainstream, a full native version is always better.
If that need ceases, perhaps because you've built
a business system around PASE applications, then why would you keep
Unix-y things running on a non-Unix box? Especially when most sites
have Unix and WinDOS systems too.
Agreed. I've been saying this for years. Every year IBM comes out and
announces these great "innovations" and they involve stuff like "look,
now you can run Windows on i" or Linux, or AIX, or Linux applications,
or AIX applications...
You can't ever be a leader in the industry if that's what you do. You
can only be a follower, at best. You'll never gain new customers by
saying "look, I can do what AIX can do, almost as well as AIX can"
Uhhhh... who would buy THAT instead of AIX?
Java yes, PHP maybe but most of what you might do with that can be
done in Rexx which we've had for years with no real interest from OS/
400 programmers, QSHELL is a quick fix to handle stream files in a
more Unix-y fashion primarily to assist Unix vendors, PASE exists
solely to assist Unix vendors.
Actually, IBM created QShell to provide an environment for Java. To be
completely compliant with Sun's requirement that Java work the same on
all platforms, you need an environment where you can run the java
command line, have stdout come out on the screen and/or redirect it,
etc. IBM i didn't have that -- at least not to the extent that it could
be fully compliant with what Sun required -- until they made QShell.
Granted, lots of people are using QShell for non-Java things -- and they
should, because it does have some utilities that are currently unmatched
in the native environment. However, IBM's original intent was to
create QShell for Java. In fact, if you look at the early releases of
Java on OS/400 you'll find QShell to be part of the Java documentation.
For example, why does PHP require its own web server? Why is that
running in PASE? Why can't it use the IBM Apache server (as more than
just a conduit)? Hmm?
IMHO, this is an excellent point. I asked that of Zend immediately when
they announced (but hadn't yet released) PHP on i. I asked "will this
be a native version? Or are you going to run the AIX version in
emulation?" They made it clear to me that theirs was native... then
released it in PASE. I complained, and they responded that PASE is
native since it runs directly on the hardware, so no emulation is
required. Obviously we had different ideas about what was meant by
emulation...
But, could they really run PHP natively on i? I mean, once you factor
in all of the different plugins that would be required, many are open
source and cross platform, but expect certain things to be true about
the OS, that includes the OS being implemented in ASCII, having
stdin/out with full redirection, being able to use long names for
compiled objects, etc. Remember, PHP isn't created by a company to
service IBM i customers. It's created by the community in a serious of
many open source projects. How vast would the changes to OS/400 have to
be to support all of that natively?
But, I personally WISH it was native. I hate running two Apache
instances. Configuring the web server to do all of the things I want to
do is definitely more difficult, since I can't use IBM directives in the
PASE Apache, and the proxy that's in a native server can't always do the
job because it's only a proxy.
I guess it's a tricky thing... I really want it to be native, but I can
see the argument against it. It's too bad that things aren't the other
way around, that IBM i isn't the mainstream version that everyone's
writing stuff for, and the Unix things less mainstream. That seems
backwards. Unix is much less user friendly, much harder to administer,
harder to upgrade, harder to keep stable, harder to keep secure, etc.
It's not as well designed as OS/400. It really seems backwards that
they are the mainstream option and we are not.
But, as far as SFTP goes... I think it'd be an awesome native
application. It'd be better in the native environment than in PASE.
But it's not... and I'm working for a sausage company, and am not
really in a position to make a native app... so I make do with what I
have available, the Unix one. I try my best to help others use it too,
not because I want to see them use a Unix environment, but because they
have a business problem to solve.
But until someone at IBM understands the value of i vs other
environments, and IBM starts promoting it, and drawing in new customers,
making it more mainstream... well, we'll get by with what we have.
What else can we do?
midrange.com
