Re: Rise of Node -- WEB400

I think "lots of shops" is also an exaggeration. But also subjective.

I've always liked JS and for me, if I can't use RPG, I'll use Node for
sure. But, with how quickly it's updated, and how the updates seem to
break things, it's a learning curve. In the RPG world we're used to even
our RPGII programs still working with an OS upgrade, or PTF, etc, with
maybe a recompile at the most is needed. Most times not even that. Not
with node.

The biggest example is from Node4 to Node6 and the complete change of how
the db2 functions work. Something that is integral to a Node application
on the IBMi. Why? IBMi deals with data! Not just web pages and
storefronts.

The biggest change was moving db functions to asynchronous in nature.
That's going to trip up anyone that isn't very familiar with async calls,or
just thinks they can just change the require for db2(a) in their source.

I had put together an encapsulated set of Node functions to do DB stuff
(return result sets, insert, update, etc). It took me a few hours to
update it so it would work as it did before with node6 (I chose not to use
the available but no longer update synchronous versions) which of course
also meant updating anything and everything that called those functions as
well.

And of course, the examples are terrible. Most, that aren't IBM, are just
copied from IBM with little or no change.

I have more thoughts on that which I will save for a later date.. .;)
While this type of thing is frustrating, I also find it invigorating.

Bradley V. Stone
www.bvstools.com
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On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 1:33 PM, Justin Taylor <JUSTIN@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I didn't want to continue hijacking the other thread, but I wanted to
comment on this:

"Lots of shops are seeing the writing on the wall with RPG and are moving
away from it(n1) and selecting their next generation language. They could
go with the solid PHP, but then they'd be picking a language that's not on
the rise. They could go with Ruby (not extensively adopted on IBM i,
though very popular everywhere else). They could go with Python (another
solid general purpose language, and seeing more adoption on IBM i than
Ruby). Or they could go with the newer kid on the block that offers
something none of the others can, a single language for client and server."

I don't doubt your observation. I suspect that a large part of the
"writing on the wall" is from the mass of technical debt caused by neglect
of their codebase over the years, not the superiority of Node, PHP, Python,
Ruby, etc.

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