The IT Jungle

IBM i Gets The Big Power9 Iron, But Not The Midrange

August 15, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

First of all, let me apologize for not getting to this story last week, but I had a bunch of personal stuff going on and frankly, it is still going on. To eliminate the mystery, I will tell you the big part, which is that I was preparing to get married, then got married, and then tried to take a short honeymoon out in the mountains, and I did not expect for IBM to try to announce the last of the Power9 servers smack dab in the middle of all that.

But on August 7, IBM did just that. For …
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Latest IBM i TRs To Ship Next Month

August 15, 2018 Alex Woodie

IBM unveiled a pair of out-of-bound technology refreshes (TRs) for the IBM i operating system last week. In addition to supporting the new Power Systems E980 server, IBM i 7.3 TR5 and 7.2 TR9 bring a set of enhancements to the platform’s database, development tools, and the administrative interface.

The IBM i installed base has grown accustomed to seeing operating system updates in the spring and the fall. This twice-a-year pattern has been with us, more or less, since IBM shifted to the TR approach several years ago. But IBM broke with that tradition last week when it announced that …
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Visual LANSA Goes Low-Code With High Tech Update

August 15, 2018 Alex Woodie

As one of the original advocates of fourth-generation language (4GLs), LANSA knows a thing or two about the value of abstraction layers. While the hype around 4GLs has long since passed, LANSA continues to build on its foundation with new features aimed at keeping customers ahead of the technology curve. That work is on display with the recent update to its “low-code” environment, Visual LANSA version 14 SP2.

Visual LANSA is LANSA‘s flagship integrated development environment (IDE) for creating modern graphical applications. The IDE employs numerous techniques to minimize the amount of Rapid Development and Maintenance Language (RDML, its …
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Four Hundred Monitor, August 15

August 15, 2018 Dan Burger

A new star was born last week. August 7 was the official launch of Power9. IT Jungle has been covering the impending launch for months, and be assured we will continue to stay on top of Power9 and how it relates to our i ecosystem. With the pace of change in tech right now, it is more important than ever to keep up on those skills, so be sure to look for opportunities for learning and collaboration with other Power Systems professionals. We also have some new blogs and podcasts to share with you this week in our Redbooks, White …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Number 20, Volumes 31 and 32

August 15, 2018 Doug Bidwell

We have some catching up to do this week. Summer is winding down, the kids are going back to school, and it’s time to get things back in order in PTF Land. There actually wasn’t much to report with Volume 31 of our PTF Guide, mostly due to the announcements that were expected in time for Volume 32. Still, 31 brought us a fix pack for Rational Developer for i (9.6), as well as some new links on how to configure ObjectConnect, what system fixes are required for Domino, and the IBM i collaboration software compatibility guide.

Here’s the defective …
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Big Blue Moves Up Technology Refreshes For IBM i

August 6, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We knew that IBM was getting ready to flesh out the Power9 server lineup with the “Cumulus” processors for scale-up systems, used in machines that span from four to 16 sockets in a single system image, and we told you all about that last week for an announcement that is expected to come to pass on August 7. This is fitting with all of the rumors we heard at the beginning of the year, which expected the big iron to come in the third quarter.

Normally, we expect Technology Refresh updates for the current versions and releases of IBM i …
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CIO Summit Brings Execs Up To Speed On IBM i

August 6, 2018 Alex Woodie

The IBM i server is mystery to many. Not only does it run on abnormal hardware – at least compared to “standards-based” X86 computers – but its programming languages, user interfaces, and administrative tasks can seem otherworldly to the uninitiated. For Alan Seiden, the organizer of an IBM i-focused executive get-together known as the CIO Summit, dispelling the platform’s mystery represents something of a personal challenge.

The next CIO Summit is in about two months, and Seiden, who’s a well-known PHP on IBM i expert as well as the founder and principle of the Seiden Group, is looking forward …
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Guru: Beefing Up The Job Log, Take Two

August 6, 2018 Ted Holt

In Tracing Routines Explain Why The Computer Did What It Did, I wrote about the usefulness of writing information about program execution to determine why a program run gave certain results. Today I want to present a simpler method than the tracing routines. The tracing routines are not obsolete, but they are powerful and I have found them at times to be overkill.

Just a word about terminology. Since I wrote that article five and a half years ago, my reading has led me to a different understanding of the terms tracing and logging. I’ve since decided that …
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As I See It: Just Bag IT

August 6, 2018 Victor Rozek

Only two days in, my stay in Lassen Volcanic National Park was cut short by vanishing stars. Evidently the “new normal” knows no boundaries and has no respect for vacationers. It seems that every year now, there are fires, terrible fires, consuming the West. In Redding, California, 50 miles west of the park, 966 homes and six people were lost. More are missing. Over 90,000 acres of drought-stressed brush remain ablaze. As of this writing, 38,000 residents may have to be evacuated as swirling winds are spreading flames in all directions.

But in the distant mountains I knew nothing of …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 30

August 6, 2018 Doug Bidwell

It is summer, and it is the usual quiet time in PTF Land. This week, there are new PTF groups for HIPERs and HTTP server! There is good stuff in there. . . .

The SAP required PTF lists were updated on July 20 for IBM i releases 7.2 and 7.3, on the July 16 they were updated for IBM i 7.1. If you are running SAP, you might check out their links on the links page.

There are, as you know from reading The Four Hundred, new enterprise servers coming, and they are very powerful machines! And there …
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Guru: A Bevy of BIFs – %Dec to the Rescue

August 1, 2018 Susan Gantner

Author’s Note: This tip was first published back in 2009. I’ve updated the code examples here to use free format declarations. In addition I’ve added the potential use of %ScanRpl, which didn’t exist at the original publication date.

More and more in RPG applications these days, it seems we need to process data that comes from “the dark side.” Translation: from a non-i system. This data could be coming from a browser screen via an RPG CGI program, from a CSV (comma-separated values) flat file, from an XML or JSON document, or myriad other ways. One thing these dark sources …
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Guru: An Introduction to RPG’s XML-INTO, Part 1

August 1, 2018 Jon Paris

Author’s Note: The original version of this article was written in the V6 timeframe and included references to V5R4. References to the V5R4 limitations have been removed from this updated version. I have also updated the data definitions to take into account RPG’s ability for the direct coding of nested data structures rather than having to use LikeDS as before.

RPG IV’s built-in XML support has been available for some time now, having been originally introduced with V5R4 back in 2006. However, it wasn’t until the advent of V6 with its removal of many of RPG’s size limits that it …
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Guru: Getting The Message, Part 1

August 1, 2018 Paul Tuohy

Author’s Note: This article was originally published in October 2009. Since then I have worked on many modernization projects with many clients and, in every one of those projects, we have used some form of the contents of this (and the following) article. The content of the article has been updated for free form RPG and some of the coding enhancements that have been introduced, into RPG, since the original publication of this piece.

When we look at modernizing applications (or writing new applications) one of the basic principles is to tier the application — i.e., separate the interface — …
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IBM Readies Big Iron With “Cumulus” Power9 Chips

July 30, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Power Systems lineup has been updated top to bottom on single-socket and dual-socket machinery based on the “Nimbus” variants of the Power9 chip, which sport up to 24 cores per die and have up to four threads per core. These Nimbus chips are used in all kinds of machines, including those that can run IBM i, either alongside AIX or Linux using the PowerVM hypervisor or in what is made to look like a bare metal IBM i setup but which is really a PowerVM machine with one partition. (Shhhhh.) The Nimbus processors are also deployed in …
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Syncsort Unveils MFA, Bolsters IBM i Security Suites

July 30, 2018 Alex Woodie

Syncsort last week unveiled new security and auditing capabilities for its IBM i user base, including a new multi-factor authentication (MFA) solution dubbed the Cilasoft Reinforced Authentication Manager for IBM i, as well as new releases of the Cilasoft and Enforcive security suites.

Developing and selling security software has become one of the focuses for Syncsort, the Pearl River, New York, company that previously concentrated on developing mainframe data integration solutions and extract, transfer, and load (ETL) technology for distributed Hadoop clusters.

Since it merged with IBM i high availability vendor Vision Solutions last year, Syncsort has acquired several …
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Guru: Refactoring RPG – Indicators

July 30, 2018 Ted Holt

Occasionally I hear someone comment about how terrible indicators are. I don’t think they’re bad. Indicator-laden RPG helped me graduate debt-free with a computer science degree and housed, clothed, and fed my family for several years. I prefer to say that indicators were good for their time, but now we have better programming techniques that I much prefer to use.

Refactoring code to reduce or even eliminate the use of predefined indicators (not indicator variables) can pay off big in benefits. The fewer indicators a program uses, the easier it tends to be to read, understand, modify, and debug that …
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Mad Dog 21/21: Sacred Families

July 30, 2018 Hesh Wiener

Catalonia is an autonomous region in the northeast corner of Spain. Its people prefer the Catalan language to Spanish or Occitan. During the past two centuries, Catalonia has been beloved home to many artists and, notably, architects. In Barcelona, Catalonia’s largest city, the magnificent cathedral Sagrada Familia (Sacred Family) is finally approaching completion nearly 100 years after the death of its inspiring architect, Antoni Gaudi. Sagrada Familia is one reason Catalonia is a mainstay of Iberian culture comparable in stature and influence to the position in information technology held by IBM.

Although IBM no longer has the …
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Introducing Four Hundred Guru Classic

July 30, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Application modernization is all the rage in the IBM i market these days, and for good reason. There is free form RPG that opens up new possibilities, and a slew of new programming languages and frameworks from the open source community that have been added to the platform. Just like some applications need to be updated and some don’t, some tech tips and tricks need to be updated while others don’t. Four Hundred Guru Classic is a new edition of The Four Hundred that is going to reach back into the archive of tech tips and tricks and amalgamate and …
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More Transparency Needed For Open Source Running on IBM i

July 25, 2018 Alex Woodie

Open source may be the future of IBM i. It certainly seems that way at the moment. But if open source is going to soar to new heights on the platform, it will need better integration with the existing processes in place to monitor and manage the platform.

That’s the opinion of JK Grafe, the CEO of Quad Nova Group, a Jacksonville, Florida-based IBM i consultancy that has offices up the Eastern Seaboard. By Grafe’s own admission, open source is a great thing for the platform. But the difficulty in seeing what’s actually going on with open source workloads …
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IBM i Gets An Influx Of Machine Learning Tooling

July 25, 2018 Alex Woodie

Thanks to the new RPM and Yum open source software delivery methods unleased by IBM earlier this year, IBM i shops can now run the latest in Python-based machine learning tools, including NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, and Scikit-Learn.

Interest in using Python to build machine learning models has exploded in recent years, and we’re now at the point where Python is considered to be the predominant language for doing data science, followed closely by R, which is taught more in academic settings.

While the capability to train or run a machine learning model isn’t generally the number one requirement for organizations …
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