Re: Vendor presentations

[Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>]

[Why is it that every time I post something wanting people's opinions, I 
spark a debate?...Can't we all just get along?... ;^)]

Well, there are a number of competing languages, products, and architectures.

During the CGI vs. JSP discussion, Seth Newton of Profound Logic pointed out 
the efficiency of  embedding HTML and RPG in the same source file, and using a 
tool to generate code that simply writes a stream vs. using a template approach 
like CGIDEV2, which separates HTML from RPG code but requires calls to 
procedures like updHTMLVar() which adds quite a bit of overhead.

Brad Stone, on the other hand, pointed out the advantage of keeping HTML 
separate from RPG from a maintenance perspective.

I found myself contemplating whether there was a way to keep HTML separate from 
RPG but avoid the overhead of replacing field markers in templates.  No, I 
couldn't come up with a good way of doing that, so I found myself left with the 
choice of going with an architecture that has a cleaner programming interface 
but adds quite a bit of overhead, vs one where the code is more difficult to 
understand and maintain, and locks me in to a code generator, but is more 
efficient.  I finally decided that cleaner code was more important.  This was a 
difficult decision for me because I've always given performance quite a bit of 
weight.

It's possible with a combination of Servlet, JSP, and Beans to keep the 
programming interface fairly cleanly separated (though not as cleanly separated 
as an HTML template approach), but like the template approach there is quite a 
bit of overhead associated with updating bean values from database values, then 
inserting bean values into the HTML stream, even though JSPs are compiled at 
runtime.