Re: Online ordering.

If you really want to roll your own, there's always ASNA's AVR.



James Le Leux
Dir IT Cherry & Shur-Lok
714.929.8063


On Sep 18, 2009, at 3:59 PM, "Peter Nielsen"  
<[email protected]> wrote:

> Weston,
>
> I agree with Kevin regarding "roll your own" solutions if you want  
> your
> storefront to present a seamless, well-integrated user experience. New
> technologies and development tools have removed many of the barriers
> that once made this kind of project a bear and have made it very
> approachable and, yes, fun on the System i. There are several ways to
> skin the cat.
>
> Using RPG and CGI will let you leverage your existing coding skills,  
> and
> an open source tool like CGIDEV2 can help to ease the learning curve.
> The down side to CGI, in my opinion, is that performance is a
> significant issue, it does not scale well, and modifications
> (refactoring) can be a real chore.
>
> PHP is another option, thanks to the fine folks at Zend. It can run
> directly on your System i and is, last I checked, available at no  
> charge
> (support is a chargeable item). Using PHP you can fairly quickly  
> deliver
> back-end data to the web. The down side, again in my opinion, is that
> since is it is a scripting mechanism, it can suffer from the same
> problems that Active Server Page applications do. Unless you use a  
> very
> good framework to develop your application and adhere to it, it can
> quickly become tough to maintain and enhance. There are also some  
> issues
> with performance and scaling, although I know those are being worked  
> on.
>
> Java is another option. Most, if not all, System i boxes comes with a
> license for WebSphere Express, so you can at least get it installed  
> and
> up and running for nothing more than your time. Developing  
> applications
> in Java is more involved than with either the CGI or PHP approach, but
> newer open source frameworks like Struts 1/2, Java Server Faces,  
> Spring
> MVC, and Wicket greatly reduce development time and allow you to more
> directly concentrate on the business logic at hand. These frameworks  
> do
> have a learning curve associate with them as well, but in my  
> experience,
> the time investment in learning a framework applies to pretty much any
> approach you take.
>
> As for integrating with XA, I agree with Kevin there as well.
> Previously, the old Offline Load mechanism and direct file access was
> your best shot. However, the Infor System-Link module offers a much  
> more
> flexible approach using web services and SOA to access XA business
> objects. I find interfacing RPG and CGI to web services is ugly at  
> best.
> However, Both PHP and Java offer nice mechanisms to interact with web
> services, and WDSC even has some handy Java tooling to generate  
> program
> code and resources automatically from the WSDL.
>
> For what it’s worth, I have developed a number of storefronts and ot 
> her
> front ends to XA using each of these technologies and I have found  
> that
> the Java approach has been the most time and cost effective in the  
> long
> run. It is an enterprise-level technology and WebSphere, as well as
> other J2EE application servers, offer a robust environment to deliver
> efficient, scalable long-term solutions at an effective price point.
>
> Just my $.02.
>
> -=- Pete
>
>
> Peter Nielsen
> Copper Harbor Technologies
> _______________________________________________
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