Surely, if the code is suitably designed with appropriate exit points, only sample source code for exits (well-defined hooks where you can add your own code with defined inputs and outputs, for the non-mainframe types) need be distributed?
I've worked with lots of mainframe software, and I've rarely seen source code distributed with the product....
MVS is really still the core operating system, but now there are new names for the package that you get when you order MVS (ie, you get compilers, runtime environments, lots of things).
So the "packaged" operating system was changed to OS/390, which has now become z/OS. The z/OS name links with the new name for the hardware (zSeries).
Here's the home page for the zSeries hardware (yep, runs Linux too!), and here's the software.
Probably the only operating system currently being used commercially that was actually developed from the ground up for commercial use, not in the theoretical world of a university (OK, I'm a mainframe bigot:-) ).
For years IBM stayed well out of the mainframe database tools market, instead it was dominated by tools from Platinum (now CA, I believe), BMC, Compuware and others. To be realistic, you couldn't really run DB2 effectively without some of these tools.
Then all of a sudden IBM announces that they are going to begin selling competing tools (not bundled, but separately priced products) and the 3rd party vendors were screaming.
Why? Yes, they would have cause to be unhappy about the new competition, but one would think that their products would be technically superior in the short term (having been around for 10 years) and too well-entrenched in many shops to be easily surplanted.
Well, it actually turns out that some of these products actually didn't do much themselves. They were basically fancy front ends to code that IBM supplied with DB2 that wasn't entirely easy to access (only programmatically). We are not talking just basic funtionality here, were talking enhanced processing. IBM discovers this, and realizes that these vendors are really riding IBM's gravy train (and anyone who has ever looked at mainframe software costs will understand how much these vendors charge for a 'front-end'). So now IBM separates that code from DB2 and ships it (and their own front end) as a separate product. What does that mean for a 3rd party vendor? That if you want to use their product, you also have to have the equivalent IBM product installed. No brainer, really.
As far as I'm concerned, the 3rd party vendors deserve to get shafted here. I've seen how much they charge - and they couldn't even be bothered to write a decent tool that could ever possibly compete with an IBM supplied one...
Novell Groupwise had all this well before Outlook, and did it better in my opinion (I was using it in 1995, when Outlook was struggling with this functionality).
Let's face it - JBoss appeals to us Slashdotters because
(a) It's open source (b) It has a whole heap of fantastic development features.
What I didn't see an emphasis on is running on a daily basis in production. Sure, I think that JBoss is fantastic for development, and most of the leading edge features are great for developers, but what about running a mission critical production system? What benefits does it provide in that arena, given that if I have Weblogic or WebSphere, and it breaks on my 24x7 website, I can scream at the respective vendors?
Develop with JBoss, deploy with WebSphere/Weblogic.
Anyone enlighten me to benefits of JBOSS in production over a commercial offering?
Hmmmmmm, interesting how there's hardly any replies to this at all......
Well, it kind of shows how bigoted the majority of the Slashdot readership is (yes, -1 for Flamebait, I know).
But, hear me out. How can we be proponents of Open source when we can't even be intelligent and critical enough to realise that acknowledging these flaws is the best way to address them?
To me, the obvious issue is support. Companies want to have someone to blame when the sh*t hits the fan. So that means they need to pay for support for the open source products they use. So, really, that puts open source on equal footing with actually buying a closed-source product, because, let's face it, the up front charge of most software products is negligible compared to the ongoing support/maintenance cost.
In my experience, this is the sole reason a lot of companies end up choosing closed-source solutions, and I tend to agree. What is open source offering me, a company with no IT skill, and never intending to have any IT skill? Nothing more than a closed source solution does. Except at least with closed source, there's a entity, a company that survives by receiving money from me, and if I threaten to ditch it's product, they'll bend over backwards to do anything I like. Open source? There's no singular point of control (generally a good thing, but in this case not) and if the community surrounding the product you are using sees no value in the enhancements you require, you're stuffed. Sure, you can hire someone to make your customisations, and it's easy cause you've got the source, but you aren't getting the main open source benefits here, are you? You're the only tester, the contributions are from a single point and probably not as good as they could be if they were developed by the community. And all of a sudden you're employing IT people when that's not your core business.
I could go on for hours, but I'm sure you get the point...
And if you wish to continue to use JSPs, check out Jakarta Struts. Struts provides a very nice way to continue using JSPs whilst still getting complete separation of presentation/controller/business logic. Highly recommended.
Agreed, it is the apps and drivers that cause the 'instability' you're talking about. But when I say that an OS is stable, I mean that no matter what I run on it, the OS remains up and operational.
OSes should not be relying on the abilities of application programmers for the overall stability of the OS. As an OS writer, one should be expecting application programmers to do stupid things, and the code should cope with that. Real operating systems (and I don't necessarily mean *nix only here, or even at all) remain stable no matter what an application is doing or has done. If the application misbehaves, then the OS should tell it off, and allow the user to gracefully terminate the program (eg, End Task for windows, kill for unix) without any sideeffects.
Most unices can do this most of the time, Windows 2000 is getting there, and mainframe operating systems (IBM or otherwise) have been doing this reliably for the last 15 (at least) years.
So when I say stability, it is OS stability, not application stability, and, as far as I am concerned, if your OS stability is directly dependant on application stability, your OS is not stable.
I expect that the majority of work allowed by Big Blue will be architecture porting and testing (eg, x86 to S390), rather than development from scratch. There of course will be (I expect) some products that may wish to exploit the Linux-to-z/OS (the OS formerly known as OS/390, MVS, yadda-yadda) functionality that is soon to come (why go over the network from a logical Linux machine to a logical z/OS machine when you can go cross-memory?), and these will be developing some code from the gound up. But I can see that a lot of software currently running successfully on x86, PPC, etc (commercial or not) needs to be tested on 390 to officialy "support" it, and, let's face it, not many people have easy access to a 390 machine, let alone a 390 machine running Linux!
This is IBM's way of getting as much existing Linux software as possible to list 390 as a supported architecture. There's a lot of support-contract related money to be made by distributions in this areana....if a company has already shelled out on 390 hardware, they are hardly going to go without a software support contract for their Linux Distro.
Having said all that, I believe that the porting effort is negligable for most user-level applications, but of course, you would like someone to actually test their software on the architecture before assuring you it works there, wouldn't you?:-)
If I could, I would. I do most of my news reading/searching from work, ie behind a corporate firewall. Most corporations do not see fit to open a hole for NNTP access. From home, I'm cruising, and I love a real newsreader vs the crap html based ones, but I've got no choice at work.....
I'll be much more excited when we can all finally post to newsgroups through (Deja) Google again. AND my preferred newsgroups come up immediately when I log on. AND it keeps track of my read and unread postings. It's hard to get excited about 6 year old postings when the above (lack of) functionality has a far greater influence on my day-to-day usage of the service....anyone got any inside info on when (if) this functionality might arrive?
Slashdot Mirror
Surely, if the code is suitably designed with appropriate exit points, only sample source code for exits (well-defined hooks where you can add your own code with defined inputs and outputs, for the non-mainframe types) need be distributed?
I've worked with lots of mainframe software, and I've rarely seen source code distributed with the product....
MVS is really still the core operating system, but now there are new names for the package that you get when you order MVS (ie, you get compilers, runtime environments, lots of things).
So the "packaged" operating system was changed to OS/390, which has now become z/OS. The z/OS name links with the new name for the hardware (zSeries).
Here's the home page for the zSeries hardware (yep, runs Linux too!), and here's the software.
Probably the only operating system currently being used commercially that was actually developed from the ground up for commercial use, not in the theoretical world of a university (OK, I'm a mainframe bigot
For years IBM stayed well out of the mainframe database tools market, instead it was dominated by tools from Platinum (now CA, I believe), BMC, Compuware and others. To be realistic, you couldn't really run DB2 effectively without some of these tools.
Then all of a sudden IBM announces that they are going to begin selling competing tools (not bundled, but separately priced products) and the 3rd party vendors were screaming.
Why? Yes, they would have cause to be unhappy about the new competition, but one would think that their products would be technically superior in the short term (having been around for 10 years) and too well-entrenched in many shops to be easily surplanted.
Well, it actually turns out that some of these products actually didn't do much themselves. They were basically fancy front ends to code that IBM supplied with DB2 that wasn't entirely easy to access (only programmatically). We are not talking just basic funtionality here, were talking enhanced processing. IBM discovers this, and realizes that these vendors are really riding IBM's gravy train (and anyone who has ever looked at mainframe software costs will understand how much these vendors charge for a 'front-end'). So now IBM separates that code from DB2 and ships it (and their own front end) as a separate product. What does that mean for a 3rd party vendor? That if you want to use their product, you also have to have the equivalent IBM product installed. No brainer, really.
As far as I'm concerned, the 3rd party vendors deserve to get shafted here. I've seen how much they charge - and they couldn't even be bothered to write a decent tool that could ever possibly compete with an IBM supplied one...
Anyway, that's the story as I heard it..... YMMV.
Novell Groupwise had all this well before Outlook, and did it better in my opinion (I was using it in 1995, when Outlook was struggling with this functionality).
It's all but dead now, though.
Gollo.
For those with no access to the IBM intranet, there are a couple of other links that might help.
here and here
Is this available outside of IBM? I'm really interested in running Notes on Linux, any pointers to where I can get these packages?
Gollo.
Let's face it - JBoss appeals to us Slashdotters because
(a) It's open source
(b) It has a whole heap of fantastic development features.
What I didn't see an emphasis on is running on a daily basis in production. Sure, I think that JBoss is fantastic for development, and most of the leading edge features are great for developers, but what about running a mission critical production system? What benefits does it provide in that arena, given that if I have Weblogic or WebSphere, and it breaks on my 24x7 website, I can scream at the respective vendors?
Develop with JBoss, deploy with WebSphere/Weblogic. Anyone enlighten me to benefits of JBOSS in production over a commercial offering?
Gollo.
Hmmmmmm, interesting how there's hardly any replies to this at all......
Well, it kind of shows how bigoted the majority of the Slashdot readership is (yes, -1 for Flamebait, I know).
But, hear me out. How can we be proponents of Open source when we can't even be intelligent and critical enough to realise that acknowledging these flaws is the best way to address them?
To me, the obvious issue is support. Companies want to have someone to blame when the sh*t hits the fan. So that means they need to pay for support for the open source products they use. So, really, that puts open source on equal footing with actually buying a closed-source product, because, let's face it, the up front charge of most software products is negligible compared to the ongoing support/maintenance cost.
In my experience, this is the sole reason a lot of companies end up choosing closed-source solutions, and I tend to agree. What is open source offering me, a company with no IT skill, and never intending to have any IT skill? Nothing more than a closed source solution does. Except at least with closed source, there's a entity, a company that survives by receiving money from me, and if I threaten to ditch it's product, they'll bend over backwards to do anything I like. Open source? There's no singular point of control (generally a good thing, but in this case not) and if the community surrounding the product you are using sees no value in the enhancements you require, you're stuffed. Sure, you can hire someone to make your customisations, and it's easy cause you've got the source, but you aren't getting the main open source benefits here, are you? You're the only tester, the contributions are from a single point and probably not as good as they could be if they were developed by the community. And all of a sudden you're employing IT people when that's not your core business.
I could go on for hours, but I'm sure you get the point...
Gollo
And if you wish to continue to use JSPs, check out Jakarta Struts. Struts provides a very nice way to continue using JSPs whilst still getting complete separation of presentation/controller/business logic. Highly recommended.
Gollo.
Agreed, it is the apps and drivers that cause the 'instability' you're talking about. But when I say that an OS is stable, I mean that no matter what I run on it, the OS remains up and operational.
OSes should not be relying on the abilities of application programmers for the overall stability of the OS. As an OS writer, one should be expecting application programmers to do stupid things, and the code should cope with that. Real operating systems (and I don't necessarily mean *nix only here, or even at all) remain stable no matter what an application is doing or has done. If the application misbehaves, then the OS should tell it off, and allow the user to gracefully terminate the program (eg, End Task for windows, kill for unix) without any sideeffects.
Most unices can do this most of the time, Windows 2000 is getting there, and mainframe operating systems (IBM or otherwise) have been doing this reliably for the last 15 (at least) years. So when I say stability, it is OS stability, not application stability, and, as far as I am concerned, if your OS stability is directly dependant on application stability, your OS is not stable.
Gollo.
I expect that the majority of work allowed by Big Blue will be architecture porting and testing (eg, x86 to S390), rather than development from scratch. There of course will be (I expect) some products that may wish to exploit the Linux-to-z/OS (the OS formerly known as OS/390, MVS, yadda-yadda) functionality that is soon to come (why go over the network from a logical Linux machine to a logical z/OS machine when you can go cross-memory?), and these will be developing some code from the gound up. But I can see that a lot of software currently running successfully on x86, PPC, etc (commercial or not) needs to be tested on 390 to officialy "support" it, and, let's face it, not many people have easy access to a 390 machine, let alone a 390 machine running Linux!
:-)
This is IBM's way of getting as much existing Linux software as possible to list 390 as a supported architecture. There's a lot of support-contract related money to be made by distributions in this areana....if a company has already shelled out on 390 hardware, they are hardly going to go without a software support contract for their Linux Distro.
Having said all that, I believe that the porting effort is negligable for most user-level applications, but of course, you would like someone to actually test their software on the architecture before assuring you it works there, wouldn't you?
Gollo.
If I could, I would. I do most of my news reading/searching from work, ie behind a corporate firewall. Most corporations do not see fit to open a hole for NNTP access. From home, I'm cruising, and I love a real newsreader vs the crap html based ones, but I've got no choice at work.....
Gollo.
I'll be much more excited when we can all finally post to newsgroups through (Deja) Google again. AND my preferred newsgroups come up immediately when I log on. AND it keeps track of my read and unread postings. It's hard to get excited about 6 year old postings when the above (lack of) functionality has a far greater influence on my day-to-day usage of the service....anyone got any inside info on when (if) this functionality might arrive?
Gollo.