Re: Why use PHP? What are the disadvantages?

[Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Comments in-line Aaron.

Jon Paris

www.Partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com


On Apr 19, 2010, at 2:13 PM, web400-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> I think the various forms of RPG+CGI have been slow to mature in the  
> open
> space (i.e. community support) compared to others, but I do think  
> there is
> adequate support out there at this point (i.e. CGIDEV2 forums,
> midrange.comforums, Renaissance forum, Valence forums, RPG forums)

Sorry but compared with PHP or .Net or whatever it is still just a  
drop in the ocean. I wish it were otherwise.

> Don't get me wrong, there will be challenges with RPG+CGI, but there  
> will be
> less of a environment change, and because of that I think the chance  
> of long
> term viability is much greater because we already know what we like  
> and
> don't like about the RPG+DB2+IBMi environment - PHP is a fairly big  
> and
> unknown world that is still a teenager in enterprise compared to IBM  
> (the
> 50yr old).

If enough RPG oriented solutions deal with the stateful vs stateless  
issue then I might agree with you. I'd also like to run RPG on my PC  
or Linux box or Mac or ... but

And I don't particularly like the notion of all state being maintained  
be the browser. Those little buggers are still far too unreliable for  
that. FF is pretty stable - but somebody's RAI breaks it at least once  
every couple of days forcing me to at least close the tab or often the  
whole thing and start over with whatever I was working on.

> What have you to say to that o' advocate of the devil! ;-)

To be honest (and I know you know this Aaron) - I really don't care  
_what_ people choose as long as they choose something to move their  
bottoms to the web before it is too late. There's no perfect solution.  
As an example - Henrik has mentioned his tooling several times here -  
I've looked at it.  It is very powerful and looks well built but -  
given that despite having been doing various web apps on and off for  
some 15+ years now - I'm still clueless about how 90% of it hangs  
together and haven't the time to learn it as there are too many other  
options competing for my attention.

I guess I am also a long way from being convinced that we all _need_  
the kind of RIA complexity that is being promoted. There are days when  
it seems to me that it is just a bunch of boys running around with  
their cool toys building stuff that nobody really needs and adding  
layers and layers of complexity (and therefore inherent failure) to  
the applications.

But then maybe I'm just feeling my age today!