Re: native PHP in V5R4??? -- WEB400

Aaron,

>From the public's perspective... What's an "iSeries"? and "Does it do
Word or Excel or Access"?    The public is not the marketing target, the
folks that pay the bills are.  And you need to show them a good business
and emotional set of reasons why they should go iSeries when all their
contemporaries are telling them to go to some "modern" app (blinking
lights GUI) that runs on Microsoft or some UNIX flavor, often times with
ORACLE or SQL Server.

Do those folks that pay the bills (CEO & CFOs) really care about the
back end or SQL?   Ah, no,  UNTIL their CIO or DP Manager says ORACLE or
SQL Server is the best way (often meaning the most popular) to store the
companies data assets (Oh, BTW, you can only access that data via SQL
(call it a language or not; who cares).

So, bottom line, public ads that talk about an obscure brand like
iSeries are lost on the general public that only knows of Windows.  
But, I know you know that.

Take care,

Dave

>>> albartell@xxxxxxxxx 2/24/2006 12:34:11 >>>
>Our users are going NUTS over this. 
Makes me wish IBM would put out a simple add that shows a nice looking
web
page with a caption "...this is running on the iSeries...". Maybe they
need
to sell it more to the general public than developers :-)

Aaron Bartell

-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
On
Behalf Of Mike Eovino
Sent: Friday, February 24, 2006 1:22 PM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] native PHP in V5R4???

On 2/23/06, Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The truth is that most anything you can do in SQL outside of a few 
> vendor-specific extensions you can do on the iSeries.  And then, when

> you need extra performance, you can go to native I/O.  In fact, RPG
is 
> the only language I know of that allows you to access your database 
> both ways, which in my mind makes it leading edge!

If we're worried about perception, why are we talking about back-end
technologies?  The folks who are managing by in-flight magazine and
making
IT decisions are doing so because they believe that 5250 is dated
technology
(and I'm not going to debate the validity of this belief as I believe
there
are situations for both 5250 and GUI [and I am my company's
webmaster]).

We are rewriting and enhancing a 5250 application (very little data
entry,
mostly inquiry, a great candidate for a GUI) using JSP/Java (running
on
WebSphere on iSeries) dealing with the iSeries back end. 
We have a mix of record level access and SQL, RPG program calls, and
some
MQT's mixed in for good measure.  Our users are going NUTS over this. 
They
are all telling us that they "did not know that the AS/400 could do
this."
It's been able to do this for years; it's the IT staff that hasn't been
able
to do this (not enough web guys to put on an internal project until
now).
The users ASSUME the platform is old and incapable because we are not
producing the kinds of apps they want.

We have all the tools we need to provide world-class GUI applications.
 If we can provide applications that meet or exceed user expectations
(both
presentation and performance), we don't need to worry about some
knucklehead
saying that we need to migrate to UNIX/Oracle or Windows/SQL Server or
whatever.

Mike E.

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