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I sometimes worry about how we perceive the Open Source products and what we as developers should expect from it. I like to keep a watch on what is happening within the IBMi/PHP eco system so I tend to watch the various forums looking at what people are doing. I had not been following the Zend forums for sometime as I was told that my opinions were not welcome, but had a bit of time to spare so took a quick look at what is going on. I came across the following post which raised a couple of questions Working with multiple occurrence data structures.
This seems to be the source of another post, Toolkit errors after update where at the bottom of the thread is a comment which had the following statement.
Frankly, I find your whole rant tiresome, but very well …
You are completely missing the point here Timo. Unlike some other toolkits, XMLSERVICE does NOT REQUIRE proprietary software “connection”, therefore you can use all manner of 1-tier (IBM i-2-IBM i) and 2-tier (any-2-IBM i) connection transports. PHP Toolkit / XMLSERVICE cannot control the behaviour of each and every connection possible, and in fact, there are 2-tier connections that don’t have any idea what a LIBL would be because this is a truly unique feature of IBM i. IN ANY EVENT, you can simply call CHGLIBL in any staeless or staefull XMLSERVICE job and change the state of the LIBL.
I read through the whole thread looking for the OP’s rant? I could not find it so I went through the previous post from the same OP which is where I found the possible source of the irritation. Basically the OP’s had mentioned that they did not have the performance issues when they ran with the Easycom Toolkit from Aura, I did not think it was said in a bad way, but simply that they saw better performance from the Aura toolkit than they were seeing with the new XMLSERVICE despite many improvements. That is not the point of this post as we have already said in many previous posts what our feelings are about the performance, instead I would like to mention a few things I would take away from this.
1. This is open source and as such if you have any problems with the way it runs you should be willing to pitch in and develop it to meet your needs. Alan and Roger have done a great job so far.
2. Don’t blame the test data, the problem is in the XMLSERVICE technology not the data or the amount generated. We all see applications we feel could be better designed and developed.
3. Comparison should be expected from clients, they took a decision based on the information they were given. Zend/IBM have said the XMLSERVICE is the way forward for PHP on IBMi we don’t but oh well! :-).
4. What is the cost of the effort so far in making the migration? Would it not have been more cost effective to stick with the original toolkit and paid for Aura to work it out?
5. Emotional responses should be avoided, I did not see any significant reason from the OP to justify the responses. But its free so don’t expect anything else.
Open source is a great option as long as you have the ability to change it to meet your requirements. Before you charge into a project which uses open source technology make sure it will meet all of your requirements before making it the standard, or be prepared to spend a lot of time adjusting the code to meet your needs. Sometimes paying for someone else to maintain and develop new features for the technology is much more cost effective than doing it yourself. Aura may seem to be forcing your hand with the original i5_toolkit functions by requiring you to pay for it, but if you look at the technology and what it offers it’s a very small price to pay for the benefits it brings. Plus you can always ask for improvements under the maintenance agreement which Aura would develop for free if they deemed it worthy.
We are still working with Aura and offer support and licensing for their products here in North America. If you need help in licensing the product or would like to know more about how we have implemented the PHP technology in our products let us know, we are very happy to help guide you to the light 🙂
Happy PHP’ing
Chris…