Web Programming & Web Application Development

[Scott Klement]

Web programing, to me, covers a very broad spectrum of things. Sure, it includes applications, but it also includes a lot of other things. Static web pages, social media, images and page design... etc.

Web Application Development specifically refers to the development of applications.

For example, you might have an accounts payable application where a user maintains a list of vendors, keys in invoices for each vendor, prints checks to pay the vendors, maintains a history of items sold, feeds data to databases that track the costs of doing business, etc. This is an application, commonplace to businesses. It can be built as a green-screen, or as client/server (thick-client) GUI application, or... of course, with screens that are displayed in a web browser. When this latter choice is used, it's a "Web Application". The act of developing it is "Web Application Development."

On the other hand, you might sit and make a web page by typing HTML into a file, and serving it out via an HTTP server. This page would not do anything but provide, maybe, pictures of your cat and funny little stories. It would never change. There's no application here -- it's just a static web page. It's considered "web programming", but it's not an application.

[danielvitale]

Here in my company, we are working with system I and profound, all our new developments are using the Profound UI designer generating a DDS source and running an RPG behind, I was reading about PHP, looks very interesting but I can not find a justification to use it...for commercial applications, looks like the "Green screen" cover all the needs.

Is there any situation where PHP need to be used?

[Scott Klement]

RPG can do anything that PHP can do -- so, no reason you'd "need" PHP. In fact, in my experience, it's almost always easier to do it in RPG. The web part of it is really the same whether it's done in RPG or PHP (or anything else for that matter), but RPG is a lot easier for stuff like database access and other important business stuff. (For example, RPG has true decimal numbers, whereas PHP would require you to use floating point, which can have some strange results when the numbers start to get larger.)

On the other hand, PHP is cross-platform. So if it's important to you to have an application that doesn't require IBM i (for example, can run on Linux or Windows) then PHP is a better choice than RPG. There's also a lot of PHP examples of almost any web programming technique, whereas it's harder to find RPG examples. And there's tons of existing PHP software out there, often available for free, that you can download and run. It's also easier to find PHP programmers -- again, because it's cross-platform, there's a much larger pool of developers out there. (Though, granted, most have never heaerd of IBM i)

For me, personally.. I much prefer RPG. I can get my work done faster, and have more maintainable software in RPG. It also performs better than PHP.

However, sometimes I want to take advantage of some of the existing free software out there. For example, these forums that I'm typing this into are free software written in PHP! So, we are running this forum software on Zend Server on IBM i, and it works great. There is no forum software that I'm aware of that's written in RPG -- and it's a lot nicer/easier to download this free stuff than to write my own. Similarly, if I wanted to set up a Wiki, it'd be much easier to download one of the excellent free ones available for PHP... so for me, PHP is useful because of the free software out there. Whereas, RPG is better when I'm writing my own business applications.