[Info-vax] First ship poll: When will the first native x86-64 compilers ship ?

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 4/16/22 20:26, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 4/16/2022 6:54 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> On 4/16/22 18:09, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> On 4/16/2022 7:28 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>>> On 4/15/22 22:10, Dave Froble wrote:
>>>>> On 4/15/2022 7:25 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>>>> On 4/15/2022 7:17 PM, Richard Maher wrote:
>>>>>>> On 15/04/2022 8:44 pm, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>>>>>> On 4/15/2022 3:36 AM, Richard Maher wrote:
>>>>>>>>> Something like Kestrel that talks HTTP and can pass JSON to 3GL
>>>>>>>>> code a la mode de TIER3. FIDO2 Authentication support.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Both Java and Python can provide nice embedded HTTP servers, do 
>>>>>>>> JSON and
>>>>>>>> potentially interact with native code (Cobol or otherwise), but 
>>>>>>>> obvious
>>>>>>>> question is whether it wouldn't be better to do it all in either 
>>>>>>>> Java or Python.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> This is the biggest mistake VMS has made for 20 years; throw away 
>>>>>>> the existing
>>>>>>> customer base :-(
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Using the right tool for the job is hardly throwing away the
>>>>>> customer base.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Cobol, Basic, Pascal, C etc. is just not the optimal language
>>>>>> for writing a new web service.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Not on any platform.
>>>>>
>>>>> Really depends on the web service, doesn't it?
>>>>
>>>> Like maybe, IBM zSystem running COBOL with CICS and a DB2 backend.
>>>
>>> I don't see that combo as special.
>>>
>>> CGI scripts in Cobol or PL/I would require the developers
>>> to write maybe 10 times as much code and the result would
>>> perform really bad.
>>>
>>> Java or Python frontend calling C wrapper calling Cobol
>>> or PL/I code may be doable, but comes with a lot of risks
>>> due to potentially incompatible threading/transactional/whatever
>>> models.
>>
>> Why would you need all of that?  COBOL does CICS and CICS does
>> the web.  No extra code required.
> 
> That sounds pretty easy.
> 
> But if we assume RESTful web services which are by far the
> most common today.
> 
> 1) How does CICS know the right URL to assign to a resource?
> 2) How does CICS know whether to use path or query URL?
> 3) How does CICS know whether to do XML or JSON or both?
> 4) How does CICS know whether to do CORS?
> 

Can't answer that because I haven't a clue what your talking about.
I'm not a web developer.  I do real programming.

>>> Neither seems attractive to me.
>>>
>>> Doing it all in Java is possible (Java on z works
>>> with CICS and DB2). Maybe it is also possible to do
>>> it all in Python (Python does support DB2 but I don't
>>> know about CICS - and I would probably prefer Java over
>>> Python for such code anyway).
>>>
>>> If the use case allows for async updates then it would
>>> be easy to have Java or Python read directly from DB2
>>> but send all updates to IBM MQ and have some regular
>>> Cobol or PL/I code handle the actual update (there are
>>> most likely existing code there that can be reused).
>>>
>>
>> IBM COBOL does Embedded CICS just like Embedded SQL.
>> It can all be done without any of the wrappers people
>> seem so enthralled with.
>>
>> As for the non-IBM side.  I have done a number of proof of
>> concept COBOL <-> WEB systems back in my academia days.
>> It's actually easier than PHP. Cleaner than PHP.  Easier to
>> understand than PHP.  And definitely more secure than PHP.
> 
> CGI scripts or?

I guess some would call it that, but what I did weren't "scripts",
they were real programs.  As part of my proof of concept I did do
scripts, too.  In some cases I took complex (and un-discernible)
PHP scripts and redid them in simple Shell Scripts and also in
COBOL.  The results were much easier to understand (and thus to
maintain) and definitely more secure.

bill