• Removing The Last Governor: Core Software Pricing

  July 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This being near the July 4th holiday in America, which is a significant time for me and my life with The Four Hundred, I am going to ask your indulgence and tell you a story or two.

  When I first moved to New York City way back in December 1988, it was not the first time that I had encountered a recession. But it was an important one that changed my life and, I like to think, yours.

  My parents were the grandchildren of farmers, and their parents worked in the factories of upstate rural New Jersey – there …

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• VACAVA’s Low-Code Approach To Modernization

  July 9, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops have lots of options when it comes to application modernization. At one end of the spectrum are screen-scraper tools, which can provide a quick fix for shops tired with the 5250 interface. IBM i shops with more time, money, and inspiration may choose to completely rewrite their application on a new platform. Somewhere in between lies RapidBIZ, a low-code modernization affair from VACAVA.

  The folks at VACAVA knows a thing or two about the IBM i platform. For starters, the company is based in Rochester, Minnesota, home of the world-famous IBM lab where the AS/400 was created …

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• Guru: Speed Up Web Pages Using Apache’s mod_deflate

  July 9, 2018 Alan Seiden

  If your web applications run on HTTP Server (Powered by Apache) for i, you can enable a powerful Apache extension, mod_deflate, to speed up your site. Just as zipping up files on your PC saves space and accelerates file transfers, mod_deflate “allows output from your server to be compressed before being sent to the client over the network.” (See https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_deflate.html for more information.) My tests show a speed improvement of 10 to 50 percent.

  You can compress any text-based output, including HTML (whether plain .html files, output from RPG CGI programs, PHP, or other languages), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, July 9

  July 9, 2018 Dan Burger

  Summer may be in full swing but the IT community has yet to go into vacation mode. There is still a lot of action happening around our industry, including new champions in the worlds of big and small supercomputing. The women of IT also continue to make their mark as we look at another profile of female leadership in computing, this time on IBM’s Summit project. Now is the time to start planning for those Fall conferences so be sure to take a look at our Calendar below for many opportunities for networking and continuing your IT education.

  Top Stories

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 26

  July 9, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  We are running the IBM i PTF Guide in the Monday edition of The Four Hundred this week, just to keep you on your toes during our summer holiday schedule. There was a lot of stuff going on even with the July 4 holiday in the United States impending before we went to press.

  This week we have new Groups for HIPER and Java, and, a new version of QMGTOOLS, for all three releases. The Java groups for each release have significant vulnerabilities. The fixes are included in the latest Java group for each release:

  • Release 7.3 – SF99725 level

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• Lamps Plus Sheds Light On Modernization Integration

  June 25, 2018 Dan Burger

  Discussions about modernization continue to tie top management in knots. Questions about the time, the effort, and the risks to the business are difficult to answer with precision, so organizations habitually focus on obstacles rather than opportunities.

  “If you stay in that mindset, you will never move,” says Derrick Lindsey, a modernization project lead at Lamps Plus, the nation’s largest specialty lighting retailer and a leading manufacturer of lighting and home furnishings. “There’s a lot less risk in modernizing existing applications on the IBM i than migrating off of the IBM i platform to other platforms such as Unix, Linux, …

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• Trinity Guard Gives Audit Tool A Friendly GUI

  June 25, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IT professionals who are tired of using 5250 greenscreens to manually conduct regulatory audits of their IBM i systems may be interested in a colorful piece of software from Trinity Guard. The company recently launched TGCentral, which is a unified HTML interface designed to simplify the configuration and execution of security and regulatory audits across multiple IBM i servers.

  As the spiritual and intellectual successor to PentaSafe, Trinity Guard understands how beloved those old PentaSafe products were. Even though NetIQ/Attachmate/Micro Focus has not added any new features to its IBM i security suite for over a decade, there were …

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• Guru: Table Value Constructors Build Tables On The Fly

  June 25, 2018 Ted Holt

  Because I wish to be as valuable and productive as possible to the people who pay me to program their computers, I continually search the Web for new ideas and techniques. Doing so often leads me to sites that cater to other computing platforms. Today I want to share with you some SQL techniques that I learned from Microsoft SQL Server professionals.

  These techniques are based on the Table Value Constructor (TVC), which is a group of data values, usually literals, organized into rows and columns. In its simplest form, a table value constructor is literal tabular data that is …

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• A Better Way To Skin The IBM i Cloud Cat

  June 25, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may come as a surprise, but many IBM i resellers and distributors with aspirations of providing true cloud-style Power Systems iron running IBM i and its predecessor operating systems are just as disappointed in Big Blue’s pricing and packaging practices as customers themselves. More than a few IBM i customers, and indeed some OS/400 V5R3 and i5/OS V5R4 customers, sorely wish there was a way to buy capacity on Power Systems that looked and smelled and tasted more like what Amazon Web Services and a zillion other service providers offer for X86 iron running Windows Server or Linux.

  Jim …

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• IT Spending To Boom In 2018, Tails Off In 2019

  June 25, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to say what is the cart and what is the horse in the elements that make up an economy. Our sense of how well or poorly the economy is doing actually affects how we react and therefore how we actually spend on goods and services, and therefore there is always an element of self-fulfilling prophecy mixed in with the underlying fundamentals. It is hard to predict what an economy is going to do, much less 185 different ones that are interconnected on planet Earth, and it is even harder, perhaps, to reckon what one aspect of those …

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• A Platform Of A Certain Age And Respectability

  June 20, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Outliving your enemies is one of the best kinds of revenge, if you happen to have any enemies. But the people of Rochester, Minnesota, did not really have many enemies, although they did build a system that has outlived its many rivals and that continues to co-exist alongside newer platforms that are, quite frankly, still difficult and expensive to use.

  That the AS/400 is celebrating its 30th birthday this week, and the IBM i platform running on Power Systems is still around and still a viable business, is nothing short of remarkable. We know this because we just remarked upon …

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• Yum, Liam Allan, and the Future of the Platform

  June 20, 2018 Alex Woodie

  It’s hard to believe, but Liam Allan has become a veteran at these things. He might be only 21 years old, but the young Englishman already has become a sought-after speaker on the IBM i event circuit and a respected voice for open source development. At COMMON’s recent POWERUp18 conference in San Antonio, Texas, Allan elaborated on Yum’s arrival on IBM i, his own open source work, and the future of the platform.

  Allan first appeared on the IBM i scene two years ago, when he won the 2016 COMMON Student Innovation Award for his work on the IBM i …

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• CNX Opens Up Valence to Non-IBM i Platforms

  June 20, 2018 Alex Woodie

  CNX has removed several key technological limitations in its Valence application development framework, ranging from what JavaScript libraries the software works with, all the way to what server operating systems the generated applications run on.

  Despite its numerical designation, the launch of Valence version 5.2 at the COMMON POWERUp18 conference in San Antonio, Texas, last month was hailed by CNX as a major announcement. According to Richard Milone, CNX’s co-founder and managing partner, the company was able to complete several major development projects in time for the delivery of version 5.2.

  Four major changes accompany the release, according to Milone. …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, June 20

  June 20, 2018 Dan Burger

  You all have an opinion about the IBM i, but how often do you get asked to give it? COMMON is in the midst of planning for its October conference in Pittsburgh and they are looking for input from the IBM i community on what they would like to see on the agenda. The catch is COMMON needs to know by Friday so if you have some ideas, you better be quick about it. You can find the link at the top of our Top Stories. Blockchain and AI continue to dominate the news around the IT community and we …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 24

  June 20, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  Rochester, we have a problem. The statement below is copied directly from an IBM notice. I did not want any confusion about its contents. The SFTP services are showing up in some places already, but not everywhere. We will let you know where and when as we are informed.

  IMPORTANT: Planned changes to ECuRep upload and download server.
  • All ECuRep servers will be requiring IBM ID authentication, soon. Please make sure that you own an IBM ID and that your processes will be able to use IBM ID authentication instead of anonymous log-in. (https://www.ibm.com/account/us-en/signup/register.html)
  • We will discontinue the 

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• Q&A With IBM i’s AppDev Architect

  June 18, 2018 Alex Woodie

  During COMMON’s recent POWERUp18 conference in San Antonio, Texas, IT Jungle got a chance to sit down with Tim Rowe, the IBM i business architect for application development and systems management at IBM, to talk about what’s going on with application development on the platform. Here’s an edited version of that conversation.

  IT Jungle: So what’s happening in IBM i application development? What’s new up there in Rochester?

  Tim Rowe: In between all sorts of fun development stuff that we got going on back in the lab, I spend quite a bit of time talking with customers. We continue to …

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• As Systems And Storage Go Virtual, Networks Must Follow

  June 18, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We spend a lot of time getting down in to the nitty gritty of the Power Systems iron and its IBM i platform, with occasional forays into AIX or Linux where it is important. But sometimes, we take a high-level view of a phenomenon going on in the IT sector or in business in general and we give you some thoughts about how something might affect the IBM i ecosystem.

  This is one of those essays, and we think there is something important going on, and quite frankly, we are not sure how it will affect IBM i. And that …

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• Guru: RPG’s New DATA-INTO

  June 18, 2018 Jon Paris

  In this tip I’m going to give a brief introduction to the latest addition to the RPG language. The new DATA-INTO op-code. DATA-INTO is IBM’s response to the oft-asked question: “When is IBM going to introduce JSON-INTO so we can process JSON as easily as XML?”

  DATA-INTO provides this capability, but IBM has very cleverly given it functionality that goes way beyond what a simple JSON-INTO op-code could ever have done. DATA-INTO is effectively a cross between XML-INTO and Open Access. Like XML-INTO it uses the names of items and their hierarchy to unpack the document into RPG variables. Like …

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Wounding Watson

  June 18, 2018 Hesh Wiener

  CEO Ginni Rometty is highly regarded inside and outside IBM. For instance, the Forbes ranking of female executives puts Rometty in the top ten. Moreover, gender and other qualifiers aside, Rometty is one of the world’s prominent business leaders. When she does well, the results are widely broadcast; when she slips up, however, so is criticism. In the spring of 2018, media reported big layoffs in the health related activities within IBM’s Watson collection of technologies. The buck stopped with Rometty, who was undoubtedly rattled; she will recover. Watson was wounded; the prognosis is uncertain.

  The Watson problem, an …

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• Raz-Lee Debuts Anti-Ransomware For IBM i

  June 18, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Despite its reputation as a secure digital fortress for back office automation, the IBM i server is subject to all manner of modern security threats. That includes ransomware, which can work its way onto mapped IFS drives and render business documents stored on the IBM i server useless. Raz-Lee Security recently launched a new solution aimed at combatting the spread of ransomware on IBM i.

  Today’s business environment rewards companies that embrace openness. Companies are encouraged to open up their mainframes and IBM i servers and leverage the data and business processes they contain using APIs, microservices, and modern user …

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