At Your 'XMLSERVICE'

We've had some exciting feedback so far on our latest EXTRA article about using the new XMLSERVICE open-source toolset to turn "ordinary" RPG programs into Web services to easily make your RPG repertoire of business logic more widely available.

We heard from one reader who saw potential in using XMLSERVICE in his company's application. He sent the idea up the chain to one of the internal technical consultants in his company who was apparently sufficiently impressed to send it up to a director, who in turn sent it on to a leading technical architect with a recommendation to pursue a proof of concept (PoC) project. The PoC project will, fortunately, include the person who originally suggested the idea! See what reading our articles can do for your career visibility!

A more general lesson may be derived from this--if you learn about some new technology or technique that sounds like it could be of use in your company's application suite, take a shot at sending it up the management chain. Even if the tool or technique in question proves not to be the best solution, the fact that you took the initiative to identify the potential and to suggest its use can have a very positive impact on your visibility. Indeed it can have a significant impact on the visibility of the IBM i in the organization. All too often when discussing "threatened" systems we find that management rarely knows what the system is capable of and that is part of the reason for the threat.

Another person--a fellow author in the IBM i community, Dan Darnell--emailed us to say he has implemented the XMLSERVICE toolset for calling Web services from EGL. He plans to publish an article about his results shortly. The interesting impact this has for some of his clients is that many of them may be able to use the new free community edition of EGL in combination with XMLSERVICE to implement their applications without the need to purchase the rather pricey RBD tool. (We apologize about that to our friends at Rational!)

We also installed XMLSERVICE recently at a client who is now actively involved in a PoC project of its own to see if it solves a need the client has had for a while to use RPG programs as Web services.

If you have taken a look at using XMLSERVICE, or for that matter any of the other techniques or technologies we've written about recently, let us know. We would love to share your experiences with others.

Comments

[Chris]

Jon

Check out the following blog entries I wrote.

http://www.shieldadvanced.ca/Blog/?p=1411
http://www.shieldadvanced.ca/Blog/?p=1402
http://www.shieldadvanced.ca/Blog/?p=1347
http://www.shieldadvanced.ca/Blog/?p=1343

We did quite a bit of investigation but found the XMLSERVICE did not perform to the expectations set. We have been checking the new releases which are available on the YiPs site but they have not improved the performance so far. I see Zend just announced a new version of Zend Server for i, but it does not say they have a better performing version of XMLSERVICE? I do know they said the GA would have better performance but that was said to be on the 8th of December (I think I remember that right?) but I have not seen any new code on the YiPs site for that date.

XML seems to have quite a overhead, even the Easycom XML functions ran a lot slower than the original i5_toolkit functions which did the program calling.

My numbers could be wrong and I have always asked for comparative reports but nothing has come back, maybe your reported implementations of the functions may have some important feedback to share?

Chris..

[Susan Gantner]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your comments on your experience with using XMLSERVICE from PHP.

I read your blog posts and none of them seem to be related to the topic of our referenced article. Our article was not talking about using XMLSERVICE to access IBM i objects from PHP nor to replace the Easycom interface functions from PHP.

We did say that we may write about using XMLSERVICE for PHP interfaces in the future and so your experience will be more useful in that context. So stay tuned!

In the meantime, we would love to hear comments about experiences related to using XMLSERVICE to create a web services interface to RPG programs.

Susan

[Chris]

Susan

I understand your point about the Blog Entries being mainly about PHP but the underlying issue is not about this. The problem is the performance of the XMLSERVICE in its current form, it does not matter if you are calling the XMLSERVICE as part of a PHP script or directly from another source, if the performance is poor it will be the same for all calls. That was the point I was making, if these applications are going to be put into the WWW then performance will be an issue as soon as you get 10,000's of hits a day, we have already seen some issues with performance and scalability of web applications on the IBMi, your point is that pushing the XMLSERVICE could improve you credibility and help with your standing in the company, I say make sure the performance is checked before you go all hog into a project which could not only damage your reputation but also put the IBMi in a poor light when it cannot meet the user expectations.

Chris...