IBM i Multiple Language Support Generates Value Decisions

June 15, 2015 Dan Burger

IBM i support for multiple programming languages leads to freedom of choice, but that doesn’t necessarily make the choice easy. Many of the application development experts say picking a programming language depends on the goal in mind and, of course, which language skills the user possesses. But to say you can’t argue with that is an oversimplification. RPG is always going to be an IBM midrange programmer favorite no matter what. And then there’s the native versus non-native debate.

IT Jungle turned to several application development experts with deep experience and various opinions on programming language decisions.

For database access and business rules, Scott Klement believes RPG to be the most efficient. “RPG is a very elegant environment for that. It’s easier to maintain. It uses the job log to track errors and it runs natively on the system so it takes advantage of the integrated nature of the operating system. The majority of people on this platform are writing database-heavy business applications, and for that reason RPG is a great choice,” he says.

Richard Milone agrees, calling database access “normally the first hurdle you need to overcome” when using non-native languages.

“RPG developers are amazingly spoiled by having access to rocket-fast record-level access and easy and fast SQL integration. Doing this from other languages is doable, but care must be taken that performance is maintained,” Milone says.

For other types of applications, Klement points out, other languages may be more efficient. When the goal is to generate Web pages, PHP is a language designed for outputting Web pages, so it can be done with less code. The same can be said for languages such as Ruby, Net.Data, and Java (if Java is running in an application server such as WebSphere or Tomcat.)

Ruby is considered to be a very user-friendly language by Aaron Bartell, who believes Ruby lowers the barriers of entry to programming. Many of the scripting languages are able to do more with less. As an example, he says that he recently rewrote a CL program and reduced the lines of code by 50 percent.

Bartell also is impressed with Node.js, which is a server variant of JavaScript, because of its efficiency advantage of essentially being the same language in the Web client as on the backend server.

“This is special because we have a finite capacity to learn new things. Having a single syntax, (where before there was two), is a significant advantage to the developer.”

Klement is fond of Node.js, a language he describes as “extremely efficient” and “very elegant.” Another of the Node.js benefits is a huge repository of prewritten routines that are easy to download and install, and that can save a great deal of development time.

“When looking purely at efficiency of the language, and not needing to do database, I think Node.js is the best thing we have right now,” Klement says.

Klement recommends developers take time to consider whether mixing multiple languages is a benefit and he doesn’t believe programmers should be concentrating on HTML. A better choice from his perspective is using AJAX techniques with a JavaScript framework so programs produce JSON–or maybe XML for older applications–instead of HTML.

Use the right tool for the job, Klement says, but be willing to compromise a bit on that as well, because the extra cost in maintenance and complexity that comes with mixing languages can be higher than what you saved by using a different language in the first place.

“Many of the experts in the industry today recommend writing the Web portion of the application in a language like PHP, and then calling RPG routines–as Web services, stored procedures, etc–for the business logic. Theoretically that would give you the best of both worlds.”

Based on his considerable experience, this requires extra coding to call the RPG routines and therefore, more complexity is required than to simply write the Web side in RPG. He also notes that most of the newer, more efficient languages run in the PASE AIX runtime environment embedded inside of IBM i, which makes them more Unix-like and less IBM i-like. To his way of thinking, this makes the multiple languages approach more clumsy.

“My opinion, at this point, is that RPG is the most efficient way to do things today, assuming that you are writing business logic. The extra overhead of incorporating Web technology into RPG is less cumbersome than splitting it into multiple languages,” Klement contends.

With regard to memory and execution time, he gives high marks to all of the native ILE languages as very good. The PASE-based languages (Python, Node.js, PHP, and Ruby) are less so, and, in his opinion, Java is the worst.

“This does not imply that you couldn’t build a system where these languages work satisfactorily. You definitely can, one of the great things about this platform is its scalability. But you will get more ‘bang for your buck’ with native ILE languages,” he says.

Pay attention to performance, Bartell says, but place a higher priority on the language that fits best with your human resources.

“It doesn’t matter how fast your language is if it doesn’t allow you to produce business applications timely enough to be competitive with the rest of the world. CPU cycles cost less than human resources,” he says. “That’s not to say a healthy balance of performance vs. usability isn’t relevant. But, it isn’t the same balance we had years ago. All language development teams have a continuous eye on performance enhancements.”

“My focus on languages has always been based on usability, learning curve, programmer productivity (my productivity) and IBM i platform support,” says Pete Helgren. “The hardware is so rippin’ fast that performance efficiency really doesn’t enter in to my frame of reference these days. Initially a language like Java made me second guess its use on IBM i (AS/400 at the time) because it was so dog slow, but these days moving from PHP to Java to RPG to JavaScript to Ruby is driven more by the efficiency in building the app than the resultant operational efficiency.”

“Languages themselves probably aren’t the deciding factor,” Helgren continues. “Whether the code is more or less compact really doesn’t matter as much as the framework built on top the language. Rails or the myriad of JS frameworks could all be written in C for all I care, when I develop an app the framework productivity is primary, the language productivity is secondary and how well it all performs only becomes an issue if the performance is bad.”

As a side note on the topic of performance, Bartell says he picked up an interesting tidbit at the Northeast User Group Conference this past spring. During a Linux session, the presenter mentioned the IBM Power8 machines gain performance advantages based on a form of predictive processing. This bodes well for compiled languages, but not so well for scripted languages (PHP, Ruby, Python, Node.js, etc.). However, the future Power9 chip has a focus to address this shortcoming.

From Richard Milone’s perspective, the choice of the language has more to do with the comfort zone and the skills of the programmer than a comparison of advantages and disadvantages of supported languages.

“Over the years IBM has pushed various other languages to the IBM i community such as Java and PHP,” says Milone. “This has been a good thing as is broadens the options for those trying to do something with IBM i. But no matter what languages currently work on IBM i, or future ones that IBM ports over, RPG will probably always be the default. I think it would be helpful to explore differences in programming methodologies in RPG. For example, there are ways to program very verbosely in RPG, but there are also ways to be modern and efficient. The use of reusable service programs, procedures, local variables, etc. can result in very efficient code. However, many developers will duplicate code out of laziness or ignorance and therefore produce inefficient and problematic code.”

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