The Four Hundred--IBM Keeps CGIDEV2 Alive, Considers Open Source

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Volume 14, Number 31 -- August 8, 2005

IBM Keeps CGIDEV2 Alive, Considers Open Source

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Perhaps no one was as surprised as Jim Herring, the director of product management and business operations in the iSeries Division, about the commotion and controversy surrounding the CGIDEV2 development tool that has erupted in the past few weeks. Like many of us in the iSeries community, Herring--who managed the integration of the Apache Web server into the iSeries platform--was aware that the Client Technology Center in Rochester had created the CGIDEV2 for internal use by IBM Global Services.

But as he explained the situation to me last week, Herring was not aware that it was being made available to the community, or that its status was in limbo because Mel Rothman, the creator of the tool, had retired from IBM three years ago and that Giovanni Perotti, who managed the Easy400 site where CGIDEV2 was distributed and who provided technical support for the program, retired from IBM Italy at the end of June. "I honestly did not know that CGIDEV2 was a tool that was out there," he said. "And I do not understand why Perotti didn't come to us and took it to the press instead."

No matter, since Herring, who has a very even keel like so many people in Rochester, took it all in stride, grabbed the bull by the horns, and did the right thing by continuing to make CGIDEV2 available.

CGIDEV2 enthusiasts, many of whom had just started using the program to Webify their applications, were upset about the limbo status of the tool after Perotti retired. So Perotti started a campaign to try to get IBM to fully open source the program and allow a community organization to enhance and support it. The one thing he apparently did not do was contact Herring directly or any of the top brass within the iSeries organization who are responsible for the development of the iSeries platform. He did contact Rothman's former manager at the CTC and was in contact with an unnamed lawyer who was apparently working on behalf of IBM and quite concerned that Rothman had been maintaining the CGIDEV2 code after his retirement. The letter campaign generated some 348 responses from the CGIDEV2 community to IBM; you can read these letters and all of the press stories in a compilation put together in a Word document by Perotti at his Easy400.net Web site.

To diffuse the situation, Herring has made it clear that IBM is in no way backing away from CGI programming on the iSeries--something that no one in the press was saying, but something that people in the iSeries community were apparently afraid of or else IBM would not have said it. Then, he made the CGIDEV2 tools--which consist of a service program that links RPG applications to the Web interface plus free sample templates for applications--available at the IBM eServer and TotalStorage Lab Services Web site, which is apparently the new name for the Client Technology Center. (To save you the trouble of having to weed through this site to find CGIDEV2, just click here and you will go right to it.) And finally, Rich Diedrich, a Web programmer expert in the CTC, volunteered to be the new leader to maintain the CGIDEV2 code. Herring said that Diedrich would monitor the Yahoo user group and forum for the CGIDEV2 tool that Perotti created, would take suggestions for modifications to the tool, and manage the CTC programmers who implemented the changes to the tool. IBM owns the copyrights to the CGIDEV2 tool, and the Easy400.net site can no longer distribute the code. By the way, it is unclear what is happening to the other tools that were packaged with CGIDEV2, including CGICBLDEV2, the COBOL CGI tool, as well as the WEBSECURE Web security program and the JS2 JavaScript library. Presumably all of these tools are being included in the CGIDEV2 support by IBM.

"It is loud and clear to us that we need an easier, quicker way to get customer applications to the Web," explained Herring. "That is why we expanded the iSeries Developer's Roadmap and why we just added PHP support, as we talked about earlier this year. So we obviously need to make CGIDEV2 available, too."

But Herring is not necessarily done there. He said that IBM is investigating taking CGIDEV2 open source, as Perotti has suggested. To do so requires some due diligence, such as establishing copyright ownership of the code, finding out who contributed what to the code, and then putting together an open source license that allows derivative works. Then IBM has to create a mechanism for allowing people to contribute to such an open source project. This will all take a little time. But, Herring said, IBM has a good example of what to do: the open source version of the IBM Toolkit for Java on the iSeries, which is now known as JT Open and which is hosted on the SourceForge community. "It is our intent to make CGIDEV2 open source. The people who have advised me on it say that it should be possible," said Herring.

But wait, there's more. When I asked Herring if there was a way to actually productize CGIDEV2, he said that not only was it an interesting possibility, but that IBM could go so far as to embed the CGIDEV2 service program into the Apache Web server and fully integrate the future open source program into i5/OS. Exactly how the CGIDEV2 templates that have been developed would be distributed is not clear, but it would be interesting to have the CGIDEV2 service program created by an open source community and embedded in i5/OS and then have the templates distributed as open source add-ons available through the CTC site or a new CGIDEV2 site. I'll make IBM the same deal I did with a potential open source CGIDEV2 community last week: Jim, if you want to use the easier400.net, easier400.org, and easier400.com domain names for an open source CGIDEV2 community, I will grant them to the community, free of charge.

Non-Buyer Beware

While I am all for having as many different tools available to iSeries shops for developing and extending applications as is possible, even IBM's latest moves to allow the continued distribution of the CGIDEV2 tools is not the same thing as having a fully supported development tool with guaranteed technical support and a committed roadmap for product development.

CGIDEV2 is a good starting point for a lot of OS/400 shops to get their applications on the Web, and it may even be appropriate for those who can take care of themselves, but it is not a sophisticated tool backed by third party support. It could be, of course. The developers of alternative, third-party, professional tools--ASNA's Visual RPG for .NET, BCD's WebSmart, LANSA's LANSA 2005, michaels, ross & cole's mrc-Productivity Series, ProData's RPG Server Pages, and Profound Logic's RPG Smart Pages and RPG-Alive--all offer ways of extending RPG applications to the Web. You have to pay for these programs, of course. But as we all know, you get what you pay for in this world. Just as buyers have to beware, non-buyers and users of open source software have to beware, too. Community support is a great thing, if you are an expert and you have time. But in a production environment, there is something to be said for real support where someone is being paid to solve your problem right now.