On 08.07.2022 03:38, David Crayford wrote:
On 7/07/2022 7:53 pm, Rony G. Flatscher wrote:
When I select a language for a job, one of the things that I look at is the ecosystem. I prefer
ooRexx to Perl, but I find myself using
Perl for some tasks because CPAN is an awesome resource. Python may not be the best language for
the task at hand, but it pays to check what packages are available.
Indeed Perl and Python have a great wealth of libraries available to them.
There is one ecosystem that beats Perl, Python and practically any others: Java
According to http://www.modulecounts.com/ which shows the number of unique
packages
Methodology: "... Data is collected /by scraping the relevant websites /once a day via a cron job
and then stored in a Postgresql database for later retrieval. Growth rates are calculated by
averaging data over the last week. I'm gathering counts of separate modules, so multiple versions of
the same module/package/gem only count once (foo-1.2, foo-1.3 and bar-1.0 would count as 2 total). ..."
Questioning the methodology, completeness, correctness and as a result the relevance. Did not find
any checkbox for Java there hence wondering where your Java figures come from.
Node.js 2019534
Java 483102
Python 386118
Perl 18354
So the undisputed winner as far as ecosystem is JavaScript.
This may be more an indication that there are many shortcomings and many packages by different
authors that try to make the same needed functionalities available.
... cut ...
Ad Java: JRE comes already with a wealth of packages on board that are add-ons
in other languages.
In addition, almost all important business applications have Java APIs such that one can regard such
applications as additional Java packages (e.g. OpenOffice/LibreOffice mainly implemented in C++
gained Java APIs and the ability to implement modules in Java; one result is the creation of a Java
scripting framework for OpenOffice/LibreOffice which allows any language for which a javax.script
implementation exists to be used as a scripting and macro language; one example for this comes with
BSF4ooRexx).
Or think of the JDBC packages of the different database vendors, or ...
I just downloaded vsam.js to process a VSAM data set in Node on z/OS and it works well. IBM are
certainly giving
Node more love then REXX which will never officially support VSAM.
Indeed this is strange that IBM does not support REXX the same as other
technologies.
Has that possibly to do (wild guess) that the developers do not know how to create REXX APIs on the
mainframe? As probably C++ has a role here, then probably CMake based ooRexx 5 with its C++ APIs
would make the creation of external ooRexx function libraries quite simple on the mainframe as well
(judging from the existence of "z/OS XL C/C++ Library Reference SA22-7821" and "z/OS XL C/C++
Programming Guide SC09-4765").
But then, if ooRexx and BSF4ooRexx were there (and they are available in the Linux subsystem), then
one can use ooRexx to exploit com.ibm.jzos.ZFile (there seem to be samples on the Internet that
demonstrate using it
<https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/sdk-java-technology/7?topic=SSYKE2_7.0.0/com.ibm.java.zsecurity.api.70.doc/com.ibm.jzos/com/ibm/jzos/sample/vsam/file/package-summary.html>).
---rony
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