Steve,
Ya had me, then you lost me. IBM can/should address the 10 character
limitation. They have been S..L..O..W..L..Y addressing this for years.
But think of all of the interfaces and internals where that limitation
lies. It's a herculean effort and like every development group out
there they have finite resources. We now have longer data names in RPG
and DB2. I saw some things in the 6.1 release that indicates IBM is
moving forward, but I also realize you were only citing one example.
I'll give you the ILE points. Well said.
What I was waiting for with bated breath was your follow on to the
comment about what folks like Zend can do. I am VERY interested in what
ANYONE thinks the third party channel can do to save this platform.
Maybe I missed your example. I think Zend and MySQL have both come a
long way, with IBM Rochester's help, btw. These two partners have
opened up the predominantly closed platform to more open source
applications than I can count! Built bridges to the OS, calling RPG
procedures from the web and even the DB2 data store. What more can we
do? Please share! I'll start writing up PM memos today!
<OPINION PIECE COMING>
Open source IBM i would be a game changer. But I do not believe it
would be for the better. The comparison I would offer is the legacy of
PHP vs. Java in the open source community. Understand that these are
both two very good products but they hail from completely different
genealogies. You see, PHP has been open source nearly from its
inception. The community has grown with the technology and also with
the advancements of the technology. There is a strong sense of pride
and ownership of the bits and pieces of the PHP language. Much like how
David runs this site :-) I think this is the reason why the community
around PHP was, is and always will be vibrant. Now Sun released Java to
the open source community and what have we heard? Are there any
EXCITING contributions that the community is making to Java? I'm not
saying that there isn't anything good being done but really exciting?
IBM i is a mature product with a highly obscure architecture (don't
forget the SLIC). Not every hacker on the i5 is ready to tackle that
kind of OS. I not saying one or two out there wouldn't try it. Maybe
even do it some good. Where would the excitement be? In the long run I
do not see a community growing up fast enough to make it worthwhile
unless IBM cut the development tribe loose from Rochester and they had
to fend for themselves. I think IBM did the right thing with Eclipse by
turning it loose to the open source community early on. That allowed a
lot of folks to join the community. But IBM continues to pour
lots-o-coin into the R&D of Eclipse. So they do contribute to the
community on a pretty significant scale.
Newton's first law applies to Open Source: An object at rest tends to
stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion. The only
thing that can disturb this law is a force that acts upon the object to
change its tendencies. Not sure there is a community ready, willing and
able to tackle IBM i. I apologize for the terrible pun, but I couldn't
help myself ;-)
Regards,
Mike
-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Steve Richter
Sent: Wednesday, January 28, 2009 4:45 AM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Is this really new ?
On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 10:51 PM, Aaron Bartell <aaronbartell@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Technology is making people do crazy things these days like jump from
one
platform to another simply because the UI is more natively graphical
(i.e.
AS400 to Windows). I believe that the same crazyness could happen in
reverse and get people back onto the AS400 IF we had a solid
programming
stack that included a graphical client.
I think the wish list has to be divided into two. One list contains
what only IBM, the owner of the closed source OS, can do. The 2nd is
what Zend and other software providers can do. Only IBM can expand the
10 char object name limit or provide access to ILE procedure
invocation process ( so that signature violations could be safely
avoided at runtime, procedure calls could be marshalled across the
network, etc ). A 3rd party can write a 5250 client, but only IBM can
write the server side that the RPG talks to when it reads and writes
to a display file. Of course, if the same IBM that profits so well
from open source Linux would give back an open source IBM i ...
midrange.com
