Client Seve to WEb?

Hi all,
i had been out of JDE for a while but came back, i left at XE and have back to 9.1 but was wondering, out of curiosity really, at what release did JDE move from Client Server to the web?
thanks

Well, the web has been around forever - actually in Xe there were web services - but it was horribly unreliable until around SP21 or SP22 or so. To the degree that most customers didn't even touch web until they were forced to.

In 8.10, users were able to use Fat Clients (citrix) still - but it was strongly recommended that they started using web. Powerforms were introduced - specifically P42101 was introduced with 8.10, which required web (ie, does not run on a fat client).

By 8.11, customers were forced to run web for the apps, as JDE disabled access to the majority of the Win32 "fat" client applications - and forced users to adopt to the web.

Of course, the web has changed so significantly over the past few years as well. Early (Xe/8.0) service packs used "jrockit" to power the J2EE engine. Then Websphere was introduced as the "web server of choice" - and weblogic was available waaaay back when. When Peoplesoft bought JDE, they disabled the weblogic, and concentrated on websphere. But when Oracle bought Peoplesoft (and JDE) - they introduced OC4J (Oracle Application Server) as an engine. Only by 8.98 or so did Oracle finally subscribe to Weblogic for JDE as the main J2EE server type - and only with 9.2 (the latest) - did they finally get rid of any trace of OC4J !

Websphere is still an option to use, but the majority of customers (including many iSeries customers I work with) use Weblogic as they purchase the JDE Technology Foundation license.

Now - as far as performance of JDE compared to the web ? I'd say the Web "matched" the fat client around 8.12. Certainly with reliability. Up until then, the fat client was not the better performing version. Lastly. Citrix still is the lowest bandwidth/better latency/easier to manage option - so there are customers that prefer to deploy Internet explorer through citrix - but this is moving away these days as an option, especially as other browsers (chrome/safari) are a LOT easier to lock down. We all hate ActiveX controls, and luckily you can disable ActiveX easily these days....

Brilliant many thanks Jon.

If you are developer then you have to catch up much as lot had changed since Xe.

Chan

Thanks john ........

Kiran...
e learning company
cit company....

Very good briefing Mr. Steel.
Thanks for kind input.

Pretty much tool release 8.98 onwards.
I think Jon's "majority" and "most" stuff is maybe a bit local. WAS is still bizarrely very popular here, and Citrix is going strong for no logical reason I can find, and even growing and spreading to other apps.
There's no point comparing "performance" of a fat client to a web client; the attraction to a web client wasn't about performance. The fat client was always a horrible thing to deploy and manage when dealing with a large user base, which is why we put it on Citrix to try and reduce the pain somewhat. And web server solution only had to get to the "not to awful" stage to be better for end-users.

Fat client is now only for development and deployment, and nearly all APPL's by default will not run on the fat client, and very few APPL's require a fat client any longer (those that do are mainly to do with deployment). APPL's are "web only" only because of a flag on F9860 that can be reset easily enough. P42101 uses power forms though, and they don't run on fat clients, and I'd really expect to see more and more of that as we go forward. The web offers a lot more potential for presentation that is harder and harder to do in a fat client.

For me, since at least about 8.10 TR 8.98 and probably before, there has been no reason to deploy fat clients to end users, and we only run a few VM fat clients as development machines. Getting a fat client set up to properly run a local web server for testing development of APPL's is still not as simple and straight forward as it should be though.