iSeries Web Services Revolve on Free Axis
by David Morris

The number of companies exchanging data through Web services is growing, and XML-based Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) has emerged as the standard that enables those exchanges. You can write code to build and send SOAP messages yourself, but a better option is Apache Software Foundation's Axis, which is part of the Jakarta project. Axis is an open-source Java package that uses SOAP and provides client and server support that makes it easier to build applications that exchange data through Web services. READ MORE >

Implementing Referential Constraints in Referential Integrity
by Jim Coker

In my last article, "Referential Integrity: Ensuring Your Database Contains Only Valid Data," I discussed the different concepts involved in Referential Integrity. In that article, I reviewed the two types of constraints available in RI: a "referential" constraint, in which a column in a table is verified to be consistent with a column in another table, and a "check" constraint, in which a column in a table is verified to be consistent with a hard-coded value or the value of another column within that same table. READ MORE >

Printing from Qshell
by Ted Holt

If you have used Qshell much at all, you have probably stumbled upon one of its limitations: that it cannot write to a printer file. I like Qshell, but I don't like that limitation, so I decided to do something about it. I wrote an RPG program to read the standard input file and write to printer file QSYSPRT. I named my program report. READ MORE >

Prompting iSeries Commands: A Closer Look
by Kevin Vandever

In "Prompting iSeries Commands in Java," I provided a technique for prompting and running iSeries commands from Java using the iSeries Toobox for Java. If you had a chance to check out the code you may have noticed that it was rather simple and pretty high-level. You also may have noticed that, "out of the box," the help text didn't work. In this article, I'll not only show you how to add the help function to your application but also explain a little of what's going on behind the scenes. READ MORE >

ASNApalooza Contest Winner Announced!

OS/400 programmer Richard Brown is about to find out what it's like to program in the Microsoft .NET environment. Next month, in San Antonio, Brown will attend ASNApalooza, the best place for OS/400 programmers to learn about Microsoft's .NET, Visual Studio environment, and database connectivity.
During the month of January, Guild Companies and ASNA cosponsored the educational gateway leading up to the conference, scheduled for March 5 through 7. Brown, of Reno, Nevada, was randomly chosen from a list of Guild Companies newsletter subscribers who expressed an interest in the free educational opportunity. He has attended ASNA's annual users conference in the past but had not planned to attend this year because of budgetary cutbacks.
Much of the 2003 ASNApalooza will focus on the underpinnings of .NET, and what it offers OS/400 programmers, through using ASNA Visual RPG. ASNA Visual RPG for .NET is an RPG development environment for the .NET platform. ASNApalooza session topics include XML, DLL, SQL, .NET coding exercises for Windows and the Web, and browser-based user interfaces. Click here for more information on ASNApalooza.

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