Big Blue Refreshes The Technology for IBM i 7.4 And 7.5

April 12, 2023 Alex Woodie

As expected, IBM yesterday unveiled its Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i, including version 7.5 TR2 and 7.4 TR8. These are relatively minor releases that bring incremental improvements to core areas of the platform, including IBM i Navigator, IWS, PowerHA, and RPG, among others. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but the enhancements are undoubtedly just what many users need.

We’re going to dive into each of the enhancements and do full coverage of them in the coming weeks here at IT Jungle. For today, we’re going to provide a broad overview of the new stuff that IBM just announced this week and will ship next month.

At the top of the list of new stuff is IBM i Navigator, specifically the new Web-based client that IBM released in the fall of 2021.

New Nav, as the product is called, now features integration with the Advanced Job Scheduler, which was one of the most-requested features among IBM i users trying to get off the old Navigator product, which is susceptible to the Log4j vulnerability that hit later in 2021. Other New Nav features in IBM i 7.5 TR2 include support for DNS configuration and support for the Integrated File System (IFS).

On the database front, IBM is now leveraging more of the Power10 goodness that IBM built into the hardware with the SQL Query Engine (SQE). IBM Product Manager Alison Butterill says internal testing shows some complex queries will run 20 percent faster thanks to the Power10 hardware boost. That’s certainly enough to get the attention of some IBM i shops always looking to gain an edge on performance.

These releases also bring a host of new SQL-based services that accomplish various tasks on the system and serve as replacements for writing Control Language (CL) code or working with system APIs. Db2 for i database guru Scott Forstie’s team has been cranking out the services in recent TRs, and IBM i 7.5 TR2 and 7.4 TR8 appear to follow that general pattern. According to Butterill, these releases will sport 15 to 20 new IBM i Services or Db2 for i Services.

We’ll provide full coverage of these SQL services in the coming weeks in IT Jungle. Forstie will also be covering these in an IBM i Guided Tour on April 12, and you can bet there will be at least one session on this at the POWERUp 2023 conference that COMMON is hosting in two weeks in Denver, Colorado.

IBM is adding a Remote Systems Explorer (RSE) interface to Integrated Web Services (IWS). RSE, of course, is a Rational Developer for i (RDi) component that allows users to explore application libraries on remote systems. With this enhancement, IBM is allowing non-RDi users to access the RSE functionality via a REST API. Users of Merlin and other VSCode products, like Code for IBM i, will benefit, as well third-party software vendors with development tools, Butterill says.

Speaking of developers (ahem), RPG and COBOL are getting some love once again with the new TRs. According to Butterill, there are new built in functions (BIFs) in the Rational Development Studio for i (RDS) compiler package to perform percent splits in RPG (%SPLIT), new string BIFs for %LEFT and %RIGHT, and others. Stay tuned for more details from Barbara Morris’ team in Toronto in the coming weeks.

This is not a big release for Merlin, which debuted a year ago and by all accounts has generated a fair amount of interest from developers who want a lightweight, VSCode-based IDE (plus all the supporting stuff that Merlin provides). Merlin does get improved CL parsing with this release.

But IBM is delivering some additional capability for VSCode with the new TRs. Specifically, IBM is enhancing the VSCode extensions pack to bring new ways to upload files, to connect securely to IBM i without authentication, new TypeScript API documentations, and support for CL. Support for the IBM i debugger is also included, but that was delivered earlier this year.

Elsewhere on the open source front, IBM is bringing more Java application servers to IBM i. If you don’t want to use WebSphere or Tomcat, with 7.5 TR2 and 7.4 TR8, you now have the option of using open source alternatives like WildFly, an open source version of JBoss, and Eclipse Jetty.

PowerHA SystemMirror for IBM i is also getting a major new capability. In previous releases, PowerHA users could replicate data from one primary box to one secondary system using the geographic mirroring data replication protocol. With 7.5 TR2 and 7.4 TR8, PowerHA now supports six-node deployments, meaning a user can replicate from one primary system to up to five secondary systems.

IBM is bolstering the SYSTOOLS schema that gives you examples for how to incorporate SQL into your products. Finally, Backup and Recovery Media Services (BRMS) is getting some new stuff, which we’ll cover in a future issue.

IBM will be covering many of these new capabilities in the IBM Guided Tours that it’s holding on the Web this year. And of course, IBMers will be out in force at the POWERUp conference in Denver in a couple of weeks. In the meantime you can peruse the IBM announcement letter for IBM i 7.5 TR2 here and for IBM i 7.4 TR8 there.

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