Re: Honesty vs Opinion vs The Truth - Best IBM i Tool Set

<Buck>I'm very interested to read how other people have tackled the problem
of 'legacy' business rules overlapping new web deployments.

If you *trust*, and have control over, all of the programming then you can
make calls to existing RPG via PHP's itoolkit. I say "trust" because
that's been one of the challenges of IBM i shops to date is they don't
trust the "PC programming dept" to do it right. From the sounds of it,
you, Rob, don't have the trust issue because you are both depts.

<Rob>I am most interested in what gives me the best bang for the long term.

My take...

Triggers obviously will catch anything and everything. This can be a good
thing depending on whether you have issues with many apps all doing
INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE actions against the same table. It also has the more
complicated infrastructure (two languages, two environments (PASE/ILE),
more complicated debugging, more complicated deployment, etc). If you have
A LOT of applications inserting/updating that you don't have control over
then this can be a good approach and worth the pain. If you do NOT have a
lot of apps inserting/updating then this approach is overkill (IMO) and can
instead be organized in your PHP code.

Even 10yrs down the road you can make it so rows are only inserted via a
REST call to PHP. If you have apps that are doing so much inserting that
they need crazy performance and the REST PHP is too slow then you need to
ask yourself why that other application isn't written in PHP (assuming it
is in-house).

I guess at the end of the day I am just not sold on the "RPG in the DB"
approach because it slows things down so much (aka missed deadlines).

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