My two cents worth: When I posted a while back asking whether anyone had used either Active D irectory or web services from VM -- no one had. I got several suggestions that I use Linu x as a front end.
It makes me really sad, but I have to conclude that VM/CMS is NOT a good place to develop applications any more. CMS simply does not "play well with others". We la ck basic tools like XML, Java, web services. Also Perl, Ruby, JSP, PHP. And so forth. No DB2 UDB. Thanks to WEBSHARE, we managed to extend the life of many CMS application s by "webizing" them. But that has run out of gas because we cannot talk to other applica tions -- and web applications here are expected to do that. It's really depressing having to tell people "sorry, VM doesn't support that". They then ask why we even run VM anymore. New applications here have to be written in Java, so no new applications for CMS. When we did have a Java Virtual Machine in CMS, it stunk. I don't think there is any chance that customers will ever ask IBM to rev ive CMS. There are so many other platforms that promise to support more modern tools -- why should a nyone want to use a platform from a vendor that has shown no interest in keeping it up to dat e? Most of the tools are open source, so it is not like supporting them is so terribly expensive f or the other vendors. I think I could probably port XML tools and get web services working on C MS. But that's a lot of work to go to for a single application, or even a handful. I don't think that BofA would reward me for the work, alas. Someone asked about migration from CMS to Linux. We don't migrate applications. The other platforms (Windows, Linux, Solar is) are so different that our VM/CMS code has to be thrown away. There isn't any advantage to simpl y migrating, so we wait until there is some new requirement and start over. We do sometimes replace just part of an application system, and then FTP files back and forth. (The tendency is t o leave overnight batch jobs on CMS.) In one of our earlier attempts to migrate to Unix, we installed DB2 on VM , to allow applications to be migrated from NOMAD to a real database, as a stage in migration. Quite frankly, the only way IBM could help us to migrate to Linux would b e by installing Java, DB2- UDB, XML tools, web services tools, etc. on CMS. That would allow staged migration to the new environment. It's too hard to pick up a whole application system and move it all at once. The only environment that is easy to migrate to from VM/CMS is z/OS. z/OS can have NOMAD, REXX, TSO Pipelines, the same compilers, the same EBCDIC character set, e tc. I don't see migration to z/OS happening here, probably because it is too expensive. We don't have TSO Pipelines, and have removed NOMAD from z/OS. (Some applications were even migrated from z/OS to z/VM when NOMAD was removed fro z/OS.) If we had Java on z/VM, s o that we could first convert the code to Java and test on CMS, there might be more migration t o z/OS. Alan Ackerman Alan (dot) Ackerman (at) Bank of America (dot) com
