Re: EGL, Java and PHP

["Dr. Syd Nicholson" <sydnic@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Difficult to be specific, most problems occurred a number of years ago. 
Recent problems happened in two products of mine.

1. A back up product that used the Java zip class to compress savefiles 
into files in the IFS. It is about 7 years old. A recent Java update has 
caused this to fail. I still need to fix this, probably with the 'tar' 
process.

2. I have a product called Fortress/400. A system i security product. 
This maintained a cache of objects in memory to avoid excessive 
repetitive I/O and to avoid the requirement for files to be permanently 
open. Somewhere a Java update caused this to fail ( a hash table problem 
I think). To avoid creating different versions for different customers 
on different i5/OS releases and PTF levels I removed all Java. The cache 
was replaced by a series of user spaces, user indexes, and RPG service 
programs. This is more reliable and faster.

In problem 2. above, I originally used Java because it was easier and 
had a shorter development time. In hindsight perhaps I should have 
stayed with RPG.

I agree that Java is good language when one gets to know it, and can be 
quite productive. It is the unreliability over the long term I have 
issues with. I find it quite disconcerting that software I created that 
has worked flawlessly for several years, suddenly fails for some 
unexpected reason over which I have no control.

Syd

Thorbjoern Ravn Andersen wrote:
> Dr. Syd Nicholson skrev:
>   
> > Agreed, I like to limit myself to just two languages. RPGLE and JavaScript.
> > Using IceBreak on the System I. At the moment I have no need for anything
> > else.
> >
> > I did learn Java, and have created a number of Java applications, but the
> > biggest problem I have found is unreliability. A few years after writing the
> > software that contains Java, the customer upgrades to a new Java version and
> > the entire application fails because in the meantime something has been
> > deprecated, then removed.
> >
> >   
> >     
> This is extremely interersting.  Could you elaborate a bit on which 
> things were deprecated and removed, as my personal experience is that 
> Sun is close to hysterical about deprecating but not removing.  Perhaps 
> some third party library?
>
>
>   
> > I dropped Java, JSP, Apache, TomCat, etc. when IceBreak came along. And now
> > I have no incentive to change back. Life is much, much simpler.
> >   
> >     
> I've found Java to be somewhat a super tanker (big ship hauling oil).  
> You need a lot of effort to get started, but when you are up to speed 
> you can get REALLY much done without much additional effort.
>
> How much work would it be for example to create a scalable, standards 
> compliant web service which serves images, pdfs and excel sheets 
> dynamically from contents in a database table?
>
>
>