Re: IBM i upgrades / Dev Tools

Hi Buck,

You ask a very good question and it has everything to do with where you
want your shop to be.

Some shops I am working with have determined Ruby is going to be their
long-term language and all their RPG coders are being tasked to learn the
language and frameworks. Some shops are fine with an initial thin layer of
open source lang on the front-end and then making use of every last bit of
existing RPG logic via XMLSERVICE. This latter approach probably has the
biggest/quickest payback on existing investment and spring boarding a new
web app.

At the end of the day there should be only ONE version of business logic.
Otherwise you are just asking for trouble. If business logic starts moving
to PHP then you can start offering that logic as a webservice for RPG to
consume (if it needs to).

Aaron Bartell
litmis.com - Services for open source on IBM i


On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 4:34 PM, Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 11/3/2015 4:01 PM, Rob wrote:

I may be wrong to want all of my business logic in PHP...

Here is the conundrum that we face. I think it's germane to this
discussion.

We have thousands of RPG programs, display files, printer files, etc.
They run every day, doing the work of the business.
The business rules are therefore in these programs.
We'd like to extend some new functionality via a web interface.

If we were to put some business rules on the web side, we'd now need to
make sure that the web team would need to communicate all of their
changes to us, and vice versa - there'd be two teams maintaining two
sets of business rules. Eventually, one team would neglect to tell the
other about a minor change, and the database would start to come apart
due to lack of integrity.

We'd love to simply expose all of the business rules as stored
procedures and UDFs but the decades of development that went into the
RPG code doesn't make it all that simple to separate out the rules from
the database I/O from the presentation I/O.

I've never heard a simple solution to this dilemma. How will your group
handle it? Or did I completely misunderstand, and your situation is a
greenfield project so you don't have any existing business rules to
worry about?

--
--buck