Re: PHP to RPG - "tight" integration -- WEB400

I should have been more definitive in my statement of why it wasn't tight.
Good to have people like you to call me on the finer details:-)

The last I used Java's integration to RPG, specifically PCML, I made some
good progress but then was stopped by a brick wall.  The brick wall was a
limitation on the number of parameters that could be passed (i.e. seven
parms max at the time), the lack of being able to pass date data types, and
the lack of being able to pass back anything other than an int in the
passback parm of an RPG sub procedure.

One could say that I should just write a wrapper to account for those
inadequacies, but that defeats the whole purpose of tight integration if I
have to maintain two programs to make the integration happen when the PCML
is already 70% there.

I know you are on the development team for the open source version of the
toolkit (can't seem to find the name right now), and if you have an update
for me concerning those points I would love to change my opinion of PCML,
but with those limitations it will not see nearly as much use as it could
have (PCML that is).  The crazy thing about PCML is that if it can
facilitate the most used data types (i.e. excluding pointers, proc pointers,
etc) it has amazing potential to be a catalyst for ANY language to
communicate with RPG programs - all a language would have to do is write
against the PCML schema.

Hope that better explains where I am coming from,
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com

-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Joe Pluta
Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2006 10:03 AM
To: 'Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries'
Subject: Re: [WEB400] PHP to RPG - "tight" integration

I'm interested, Aaron... what would you consider tighter integration than
the various methods that Java on i5/OS supports?  You can use the toolbox to
call any RPG program from anywhere in the world (you can in fact call any
program) via a TCP/IP socket.  You can use PCML or XPCML to externalize the
specifics of a toolbox call.  This architecture was designed to allow robust
interaction in an n-tier environment, and is light years ahead of most other
languages.  Python, for example, has a hard time calling other programs on
the same machine, much less on other machines.

On the other hand, if you're running on the same box as the host, you can
bypass the socket and directly call the program.  Or you can even use direct
JNI calls.

How much more tightly can you integrate a VM to a compiled language?

Joe

From: albartell

So now I am REALLY curious because if they did things right it could 
be the one better than what the IBM PCML Java team considers tight 
integration to RPG.



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