‘IBM is investing heavily in enterprise modernisation,’ declares Bob Cancilla, IBM Rational product manager for System i & System z when asked about web development. ‘EGL (Enterprise Generation Language) is a key strategic tool for enterprises to make use of in modernisation. EGL supports IBM's SOA initiatives and integrates with our middleware, leveraging the value of customer investments in IBM technology. In addition to IBM tools and technology, we’re working with partners like PKS Systems and Databorough to re-factor, modernise and transform core business applications to EGL.’

Then onto the stage comes PHP (PHP: Hypertext Pre-processor), which is a reflective programming language originally designed for producing dynamic web pages. PHP competes with Visual Basic and C++ as the third most popular programming language behind Java and C, based on the worldwide availability of practitioners, courses and vendors.

Alison Butterill, IBM System i application development offerings manager, says: ‘Java is important. It has been and continues to be a major focus in our application development strategy. EGL is a great way to get there. However, at the same time, the momentum of PHP in the industry is tremendous. With more than 20 million websites, 4 million developers and thousands of already coded scripts, PHP has been included by IBM as another way of taking applications to the web. System i embraces the PHP community and allows it to participate as one of the available development strategies. Traditional languages such as RPG and COBOL also continue to be strategic choices for application development. Our goal is to bring all types of application together via SOA.’

Marcus Dee, System i modernisation specialist at looksoftware, says: ‘System i needs to support all the leading web development options if the platform is to continue to attract new customers. We continue to see existing System i customers and application providers demanding reuse focused tools that support easy, rapid web delivery and provide a practical path to SOA for their existing application portfolios.’

Such a comment attempts to distinguish between the need for System i to offer the most popular web development options and typical customers’ modernisation needs.

Morpheus’s Bleddyn Williams says: ‘Having worked with OS/400 and the web for 12 years it seems strange to me that rather than focusing on some excellent IBM products, Rochester suddenly seems to have decided PHP is the latest and greatest tool to hit web development on the platform. The message I’ve heard over the last few months is that PHP is strategic for customers; it’s a vital option for them going forward. But why?

‘Having been one of those people that got heavily into Net.Data around the same time I started with web development what huge difference does PHP provide, that Net.Data never had? I can see it brings across many PHP applications and samples but my initial thought is we did much of what PHP does quite a while ago. But the most important thing is will PHP suddenly make more people who work around the System i write web applications? Will it provide an environment they will feel comfortable in and move to and understand? And if they liked PHP so much would they not already be using it connecting perhaps a PC to the data they need to use?

‘The answer for me is PHP cannot be strategic but it is really important to help those people used to standard System i development broaden the skills they have to write web applications. That is where IBM’s own products such as EGL can be used, helping someone who works in a procedural environment build a Java-based web application. The developer works with an environment they can understand and rather than everything being a mystery a lot more will make sense. With the aim being that even certain business users should be able to generate web applications and access data from the machine. That to me is a much better strategic path for an organisation to be looking at for building web applications and for many people they even already own the code.’

System Objects president, Serge Charbit, says: ‘It seems PHP is the new jewel in the System i crown. Over the last five years, remember, it was Java. But as everybody is aware, Java has not been “accepted” by the System i developer community, so the reply is PHP. I’m not sure whether the problem is the name of the language and/or what this language can do. The problem is the time available by these developers when they have finished the maintenance of their actual code, replied to the user that the printer is now available, installed the latest BI software and more. They don’t have the time to learn anything else.’

‘The only solution is to be able to maintain existing applications and develop new web applications with the same language, ie RPG or Cobol. This exists and it’s named CGI but the future is WebSphere and Portal.’

Charbit adds, somewhat cryptically, ‘There is at least one solution to maintain existing applications and develop new web applications for WebSphere and Portal in RPG (or Cobol), and it’s named JACi400.’

Derek Cooper of ASNA says: ‘iSeries-based companies have two strategic choices when it comes to deciding where they want to be in three-to-four years. One of these is Java/WebSphere, which IBM has been pushing hard, and has been mostly taken up by large companies who have sufficient resources. Moving an RPG operation across to Java can prove a very costly and time consuming exercise. Consequently, there are many companies who, after dabbling with screen scrapers etcetera, are still waiting for a more suitable long-term modernisation solution.’

 
‘The second option is .NET,’ says Cooper. ‘At first glance, .NET looks no friendlier than Java. But look a little deeper and you’ll note Visual Studio 2005 includes an RPG compiler. Furthermore, any .NET based application has the luxury of fast, secure and scalable record-level access to DB2/400 – this is not OLE-DB based. Suddenly not only does .NET become a lot more attractive than Java but .NET applications can access data in exactly the same way native applications do.’

Adam Hales of mrc UK Ltd says: ‘Many companies are put off by the costs and time-frames associated with web development. But the mrc-Productivity Series is designed to maximise the use of existing databases and hardware, while also reducing the development cycle by up to ten times’.

Soft furnishings importer and distributor Rectella Ltd was in this situation when looking to develop a business to business (B2B) website. Hales says: ‘It required a B2B website that would include order entry and order tracking, accurate product pricing, account status information and flexible user security. This needed direct access to the existing database. The existing vendor quoted £70k for the project.’ Rectella was already an mrc customer, using mrc for internal business intelligence applications. The requirement for a B2B website came later.

Andy Hughson, commercial director of Rectella, says: ‘After reviewing several options it was clear the mrc-Productivity Series could be used to custom build our website. This required no further investment in licence or maintenance fees. It gave us exactly what we wanted and we’ll be gleaning benefits for a long time to come’.

Hales says: ‘Websites are not a static medium. Any business looking at web development would be wise to consider options that give flexibility and scalability without requiring further large ongoing investments. The mrc-Productivity Series lets companies quickly and easily adapt and evolve their websites without any further cost, other than the time of their own staff.’

Established in 1981, mrc has been providing its BI solution to the IBM midrange market ever since, with 2,500+ installations to date. The mrc-Productivity suite is available for System i while sister product, m-Power, is available for other databases including Oracle and SQL Server.

As yet another alternative, Duncan Kenzie, president of Excel Systems, indicates how ProGen WebSmart creates native System i ILE objects (programs and modules) that run as true web applications using just the HTTP server powered by Apache.

‘WebSmart consists of two major components,’ says Kenzie. ‘The first is a PC-based IDE that provides a complex set of productivity tools for creating web applications. Highlights include wizards that build complete web programs with no programming or HTML coding required, HTML wizards, seamless interface to System i’s native database, a data modelling facility to define business and presentation rules at the database level, project and change management and an interactive visual debugger. The IDE also includes a web programming language and coding environment, not unlike PHP in functionality and syntax. The second component is the WAS – web application server – a service program encapsulating all the functionality to deploy web applications built with the IDE.’

Major advantages of WebSmart are touted as ease of use and tight integration of native System i operating system functionality. Developers can become proficient in a few days, while constructed applications are native ILE objects taking advantage of System i user and object-based security, plus web server security. ‘Applications are scaleable, due to WebSmart taking full advantage of IBM’s excellent implementation of CGI on the System i,’ says Kenzie. ‘Unlike PHP, there’s no need to run in the PASE environment, and unlike WDSc, there’s no need to run WebSphere.’

One of WebSmart’s key success stories in the UK is music publishing company Universal Music, which uses WebSmart for several key business applications, most notably its royalty tracking system. This application is run on several System i servers and services over 40 countries worldwide. It provides real-time information on product sales, with many flexible searches and filters, such as by artist, record label, album name, distribution dates and so on. Universal Music’s commitment to the System i is strong, and its use of WebSmart has helped cement System i’s reputation as a superior solution to other hardware/software choices.

Excel Systems is located in Canada, developing, supporting and owning most of the products marketed by BCD (Business Computer Design). ‘We’re generally known as ‘BCD Technical Support’, just to avoid confusing our clients,’ says Kenzie. ‘For the last 17 years, BCD and Excel Systems have had an exclusive marketing agreement, whereby BCD is the sole distributor of our products, although it can appoint agents to sell our products – for instance, in the UK, SoftLanding Europe. Eric Figura, BCD marketing manager, works closely with me on product planning and marketing strategies.’

Karen Cookson, product specialist at LANSA in the UK, says: ‘System i is a key platform for many companies, holding important and strategic information.  Appropriate and dynamic access to this information is important to creating a website that will benefit both business and user. There are several ways of achieving that goal, but an on-host solution provides the most efficient method.

‘Of the major on-host solutions available, PHP is a scripting utility that has been possible to run on the System i, but a more complete solution has currently become available for V5R4, and more recently V5R3 via Zend. Another solution uses LANSA’s product suite, which has executed high performance, multi-tiered, business-level transactional web applications since V3R2 and V3R7.’

LANSA is a high-level language that runs natively on System i, Windows and Unix/Linux. ‘This cross-platform availability protects a company's investment in software development as an application written for one platform can easily be moved to another, often with no code change,’ Cookson says. ‘Since it can run natively on System i, LANSA can interface with other programs such as BPCS, JD Edwards, System 21 and other bespoke applications. There are some LANSA customers running web applications written in LANSA over legacy Synon systems.

‘Web development is challenging for the developer, especially if he/she only has experience in RPG and 5250 applications. To develop for the web he must write application code to run on the server and also build the user interface, usually requiring XHTML, JavaScript and cascading style sheet knowledge. In 2005, with the introduction of Web Application Modules (WAMs), LANSA enabled developers to create applications running on System i using Visual LANSA in a high-level language.’

There are many web development alternatives open to System i users, which if nothing else only serve to reemphasise the strength and resilience of the platform. Long may that continue.

Frank Booty is System i NEWS UK's industry reporter.

This article first appeared in the February, 2007, edition of System i NEWS UK magazine.