Re: Why use PHP? What are the disadvantages?

[BButterworth@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Ouch! Sad but true, I think. I have been wondering if I was missing 
something, but Open Access doesn't seem to give us anything we didn't have 
before. If anything it adds a layer of obfuscation, and I don't think it 
is going to eliminate the need to learn HTML+CSS+Javascript and/or a 
WYSIWYG editor for developing browser UIs.

As you mention, we can currently develop event-driven (front-end) 
solutions using a framework like ExtJS to call RPG programs/procedures on 
the back-end. This seems more straight-forward and is what packages like 
Valence are already doing. There probably won't ever be another officially 
supported IBM solution, but that may not be a big deal since server-side 
languages are more and more being replaced by Javascript or plug-in 
technologies for the UI anyway.

Blake



In other words... it's a screen scraper.  It's a temporary stop-gap 
solution to help us make progress until we rewrite our programs to use 
the proper paradigm. At least, it *can* be a stop-gap solution like that 
-- provided we pay for it, and we also pay for a 3rd party handler.  By 
itself, open access doesn't even give us THAT much.

If you think open access gives RPG a future -- I'd say you're high.  It 
pushes RPG more and more into the ranks of being a legacy language.  And 
it provides once and for all that IBM doesn't care about RPG enough to 
give us a real solution.

A real solution will be event-driven...
What we don't have is a single, common, regular interface that everyone 
uses 
across the board that's "part of" RPG.  And Open Access is making 
absolutely NO effort to provide this.