El IBM i y sus capacidades actuales

 Dice Mike Pavlak: “At the end of the day, professionally I’ve worked in about six different languages. I can write bad code in every one of them,”

El contexto de la afirmación es interesante: el conjunto de recursos que hoy dispone el IBM i (¿o debemos decir IBM Power? ) para interconectarse con toda clase de recursos: PHP, Node, Python, sumados a los viejos conocidos de c. c++. java. Pavlak enfoca y evalúa la conveniencia de cada uno en función de conexiones con arquitecturas web, fundamentalmente, pero ese abanico de posibilidades puede ir más allá sin duda.

Dice Pavlak en particular sobre Node: 

Node.js isn’t as easy to learn for true-blue IBM i types, but it has one advantage over the other two: it uses JavaScript, which as previously noted has been broadly adopted by the wider IT world. However, there’s a caveat to the notion that Node.js developers only need to know JavaScript to be productive.

“A lot of people like Node because there’s a myth that I can use the same language on the presentation layer, JavaScript . . . up on the server,” Pavlak said. “And there’s truth to that. The syntax of the language is the same. What’s different though is the library usage. The libraries you’d use on the client end are not the libraries you would use on the server.”

Choosing Node.js makes sense in certain scenarios, such as when an IBM i shop has hired younger developers with JavaScript skills. Because the syntax is the same, these front-end JavaScript developers may be able to become productive developing back-end Node.js code on the IBM i server in a shorter amount of time than using other languages. “Using Node on the backend starts to make sense in that scenario,”

(...) Node.js does have a significant performance advantage over PHP and Python in on particular category: How quickly the stack starts. The technology, which was created by Google, is widely used by massive Web properties, such as Netflix. When you fire up a Netflix session on your TV, your Roku, or your phone, you’re actually initiating the deployment of a Node.js instance running on AWS.

“Node.js starts so fast, it’s so much easier to scale…horizontally,” Pavlak said. “So AWS instances are basically X86. In that scenario, Node has a decided advantage.”