RE: Mono on IBM i - Porting Mono to AIX and IBM i -- MIDRANGE-L

Disclaimer: Mono on i is a young project and beyond some contributions
and the charity of a few other people, I'm essentially working on this
in my own time. It's not 100% of the way there, but it has come a
surprisingly long way.

I'd argue the benefits are:

1. Most i shops that have non-i systems are likely using Windows, and
thus are likelier to have familarity with Visual Studio, C#, .NET,
etc. then they are anything Unix-like. (Essentially, a modern
language the "old guard" are likely to be familar with.)
2. C# in many cases is popular with younger developers, either by
choice or the sheer ubuiquity of the .NET stack, even in places that
aren't traditionally big enterprise targets like mobile and gaming.
(Essentially, a modern language almost anyone else is likely to be
familar with.)
3. Mono is a pretty performant environment, even if the PowerPC backend
is less optimized. It starts up faster than the JVM, and I believe
FFI (P/Invoke) is faster from synthetic benchmarks. It'll most
certainly outperform Python or Ruby in anything.
4. FFI is far easier to use in C# than in Java, so potential there for
better integration with newer PASE ported libraries or possibly even
the ILE in the future. (Imagine being able to drive Mono and access
.NET objects from RPG...)
5. Existing code on Windows and other platforms will need (ideally)
minor transition work instead of a rewrite.

There's more, but I suspect Richard has done the bulk of the work for
bringing up the possibilities of Mono on i. (Thanks to him for
realizing the potential here.)

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Joe Pluta
Sent: April 16, 2019 1:30 PM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Mono on IBM i - Porting Mono to AIX and IBM i

Agreed, Jim. I'm all about business logic on the i, and then access
from the entire infrastructure.

I've worked with Visual Studio in the past and I agree that it's a very
cohesive and powerful environment. It's also not without it's own
management quirks, and adding a new tool suite is always an issue.
That's why I'm writing my current articles about using Eclipse for Linux
development; it keeps you in the Eclipse toolset.

So I'm just trying to get a feel for what .Net on the IBM i gets you.
User interface in .Net is definitely well developed. But I get a little
fuzzy here. Would you actually program user interface via Mono on the
IBM i or would you do user-facing development on a different machine?

Anyway, this is good stuff. This is the sort of expertise I count on
from this group.

On 4/16/2019 11:21 AM, Jim Oberholtzer wrote:

I have several customers with strong IBM i / POWER infrastructures in their data center. Several of them have hired younger development managers who are asking why use this RPG "stuff" when I can use "___ fill in blank___"

My answer is always to keep DB2 and use RPG or existing languages for the business logic, or at least the heavy logic, and build APIs in RPG/SQL. Use whatever makes you happy for the user interface. Mono fills in quite a gap in the arsenal and makes the system more attractive to more organizations. Richard will argue that .Net with Visual Studio is the or nearly the best development environment available, and I must agree with that assessment. So, adding Mono to the bag of tricks is vital in my view.

--
Jim Oberholtzer
Agile Technology Architects

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Justin Taylor
Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2019 10:50 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: Mono on IBM i - Porting Mono to AIX and IBM i

Perfectly valid question. I think most of the FOSS dev options are to attract/assist people who already know those environments. For an i-native dev, why should they use option "x" instead of RPG? The answer I hear most often is to utilize existing utilities/libraries. I guess that depends on the kind of work you do. Virtually everything I do is so specific, everything has to be custom anyway.

(You could insert a different traditional language instead of RPG, but RPG is pretty much synonymous with IBMi.)

-----Original Message-----
From: Joe Pluta [mailto:joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2019 10:24 AM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Mono on IBM i - Porting Mono to AIX and IBM i

Richard, I know I'm lobbing one over the middle of the plate here, but can you give me a brief list of the top 5 benefits of .Net over all of the other options we have on the IBM i? Obviously if you have Windows development talent in-house, it's a pretty easy call, but what about for shops that don't? What about the .Net environment intrinsically benefits me as a developer? Why would I (Joe Pluta) want to take the time to broaden my .Net skills?

--
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