Reader Feedback on IBM and IT Jungle's Four Hundred Stack

Published: March 17, 2008

Hey, TPM:

I just wanted to thank you for the information you are providing in your newsletters. I look forward to them. I keep waiting for news of a native graphical connection from RPG to the browser and am glad to see that question asked of IBM managers from time to time.

I understand from Kurt Rump at the Rochester Briefing Center that they have some research projects in Rochester that are looking into this. Hopefully that will eventually make it into the real world. My question to him was if they were splitting up the organization to address the needs large businesses and the SMB market if they were also going to do that with the development tools. The Rational tool set that IBM is now pushing, as well as most of the WebSphere development set was aimed at the large businesses with many programmers. In the SMB market, I said what we needed was EXFMT WEBPAGE so we could talk to a browser in the same way we talk to a green screen from an interactive program. He wanted some details that he could forward on to the development group, so I sent him some.

I am planning on retirement in five years, so I don't really expect to see any progress on this before I retire. When I told Kurt that we had spent 20 man-years of work on trying to do Web applications that accessed data on our AS/400 and had very little to show for it, another person that was standing nearby popped up and said that he was an IBM business partner and he had invested 50 man-years and was having the same problem. He wanted a better connection from PHP to RPG and DB2.

I know that management from IBM read your articles. They don't always do what you suggest, which you already know, but I just wanted to thank you for your continued efforts. The AS/400, iSeries, and System i has been a fantastic piece of hardware and i5/OS is beyond description. All the add-on gimmicks that fail to meet the integration inherent in i5/OS have been of little use to those of us in the SMB market.

I really appreciate all that Brian Kelly has done to try and influence IBM. I am glad to see him on your staff, and thanks for making his books available from your Web site. I always read the Admin Alerts that Joe Hertvik sends out. The security advice from Wayne Evans has also been very helpful.

You are doing a great job!

-- David

Hi David

Thanks very much. As I often explain to people when I describe what I do for a living, all of us at IT Jungle must be doing it for love, because we sure as hell are not doing it for money. . . . HA! We all get by, though, and I am always grateful to both our readers and our advertisers for making a place for us to do what we do.

When people thank us, as you just did, it makes a big, big difference. Some days, I must tell you, it is the only reason I stay in the game.

--TPM

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