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May 12, 2012: Volume 14, Number 19
May 5, 2012: Volume 14, Number 18
April 28, 2012: Volume 14, Number 17
April 21, 2012: Volume 14, Number 16
April 14, 2012: Volume 14, Number 15
April 7, 2012: Volume 14, Number 14
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The IBM i world descended upon the Happiest Place on Earth last week for the COMMON 2012 User Conference and Expo. Aside from a major malfunction in Disneyland's IT system that saw the point of sale system go down across the entire property for multiple days, the show went off without a hitch. An estimated 700 paying attendees found themselves comfortably ensconced in IBM i education, 75 software vendors were content with attendees' interest in their wares, and IBM eagerly showed off the awesomeness of its new PureSystems gear.
Mobile application development isn't always what you think it is. Real IBM i business applications that render on the most popular tablets and smartphones, for instance, do not require RPG programmers to learn HTML5, CSS3, PHP, JavaScript, Java, or Objective-C. Last week, LANSA released a tool for creating apps using RPG/CL with DDS. Those apps will run natively on iPhone and iPad devices now and Android compatibility will be added within a couple of months.
A group of RPG heavyweights, including IBM, have come together in support of the first standard pertaining to RPG Open Access. But to understand RPG Open Access, start with the importance of RPG interfacing with other technologies. That's not all that common. RPG has a reputation for its proprietary chains. Mistakenly this stops with the topic of green screens and graphical user interfaces. In reality, it is about the separation of the user interface from the business logic.
It's a big, bad, scary world out there. Cyber-criminals are constantly probing networks, looking for places to plant malware and do their nasty business. To thwart these attempts, an organization needs a good security plan, and possibly invest in a security information and event management (SIEM) program that monitors and correlates all IT activity. Townsend Security recently issued a new release of its Alliance LogAgent Suite that will help protect the IBM i platform by providing SIEMs with more detailed and fine-grained IBM i log data.
Back in March, when IBM was hot to sell some of its fairly large Power 770 servers to close out a good first quarter, the company whipped out a quick rebate scheme for the processing capacity on the machines that I dubbed March Madness. It is not clear how effective this deal was, but it has come and gone and now IBM has a similar rebate to push some more Power 770 iron here in the second quarter.
Raz-Lee Security has been on a roll lately. Earlier this year, it launched DB-Gate, which makes external databases like SQL Server, Oracle 11g, and MySQL accessible to IBM i programs. Then at the COMMON show last week in Southern California, the Israeli software vendor launched two more products, including a change management system for the IBM i server and multi-LPAR support for its products. It also provided a glimpse into a product to be released later, called iCommand.
Two things were made abundantly clear to me as I walked around the COMMON conference and expo last week, attending sessions and talking with people and listening to their complaints. The first is that just about everyone, even die-hard techies, are annoyed with the AIX-derived Virtual I/O Server that is used to virtualize disk and network drivers on Power Systems. The second thing was that we all better get used to it, because VIOS is here to stay.
Whether working from ground zero or building on existing investments, BCD's application development products have long been used by IBM midrange shops. One of the reasons is BCD's continual investment in developing its product lineup, which handles everything from quick green-screen Web-enablement to multi-platform Web development. And for companies unfamiliar with BCD, here's a surprise--the company has a newly enhanced business intelligence tool as well.
Weakening macroeconomic conditions in Europe and Asia made for a rougher than usual first quarter for Arrow Electronics, one of the two big master resellers in the world for systems and electronic components. However, the systems business was up and the components business was down, which is a better sign than you might otherwise think.
IBM i shops that use DRV Technologies' FlexTools software to manage their spool files now have the option to use the new DataFlex component to generate reports from their data. The new report writer, which was unveiled as part of FlexTools version 5 at last week's COMMON conference in Anaheim, California, creates reports from DB2/400 files and outputs them in several formats.
Master reseller Avnet had a somewhat different quarter from rival Arrow Electronics in its most recent quarter, its fiscal 2013 third quarter ended in March. Both its components and systems groups took a hit.
Boolean variables can have only two values: true and false. In CL, they are known as logical variables. In RPG, they're called indicator variables. They're not essential; I got by without them for years. But they are useful. Let's take a closer look at Boolean variables.
Two IBM i software vendors in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area--with the IBM i homestead in Rochester just down the road--have user conferences planned for mid-September. You couldn't pick a better time, weather-wise, to explore the upper Midwest, so why not pick up some technical knowledge at the same time?
Imagine needing to delete a large number--50, 100, 1,000--device descriptions, all of which begin with the same group of characters, from your system. Now imagine the Delete Device Description (DLTDEVD) command not accepting a generic device name. That got ugly quickly, didn't it? And yet that sort of thing is what programmers often force end users to do. Maybe we need to add generic processing to our applications.
10ZiG Technologies had its latest product, the Zignature Pad, on display in the Expo hall of last week's COMMON conference in Anaheim, California. The 12-inch tall pad is a dedicated signature collection device, and has features you won't find with signature capture apps for an iPad.
Good article on the secrets of the IBM i IPL parameters. Is there a way to stop the system from restarting after my full system backups complete (GO SAVE, option 21)? There are times that it would be great for the system to stay in restricted state after a backup, but the startup CL program always runs. How do I stop it from running?
