EDITORIAL PAGE

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

    Perhaps the most interesting news pertaining to OS/2 this past month comes to us from Frank Mosesso, one of our regulars in the Discussion Group, regarding IBM withdrawing the CICS Transaction Server for OS/2 V4.1 (for IBM's announcement Letter, click HERE).

    As Frank points out to us, it appears IBM is methodically killing off their entire OS/2 product line. While taking the shrink-wrapped version off the shelf may make sense, taking a downloadable version off-line doesn't.

    Another one of our contributors, Frank Griffin agrees IBM should continue to make it available on-line, but argues there's almost no reason for anyone to buy it:

    "CICS gained its fame as an assembler-based OLTP for IBM's MVS, and I worked with it for many years. However, it was heavily 3270 and SNA-oriented, and it has lost investment dollars to IBM's J2EE servers.

    Fortunately, OS/2 has not been left behind in OLTP. All you need is a 1.3-level JDK (SWChoice, eCS, or one of the new 1.4 ones) and a servlet container like Tomcat or JBoss.

    Many people don't realize that servlets don't have to run as HTTP transactions. The HttpServlet class is a subclass of Servlet. You can have a non-HTTP servlet where the client and the servlet agree on their own communications format and protocol. Or, of course, you can always use HTTP, which does not require that the client be a browser.

    The servlet containers are quite good at preloading and managing pools of servlet instances, and with a good JVM the speed would probably rival the C++ CICS/OS2 product. Moreover, the communications is TCP-based, and the servlets are platform-neutral, so such an implementation neither locks you into OS/2 nor requires that the servlets be designed for OS/2 to start with.

    This is one of the few areas where OS/2 could compete in today's business world and not be hurt by lack of drivers or software, as long as it had a JVM that was up to snuff. You could take something that runs on Linux or Windows, run the same J2EE server/servlets on OS/2, and compare performance. It would be a straight price/performance comparison."
     

    Keep the Faith!

   

- Tim Bryce
Editor, OS/2 CONNECT

Please do not hesitate to send me an e-mail