Rocket DevOps Gets Update for Free Format RPG, VS Code, and DORA
April 24, 2024 Alex Woodie
The latest release of Rocket’s change management tool for IBM i brings several new capabilities, including improved support for VS Code and Free Form RPG. Rocket DevOps version 10.3.1 also brings better code testing capabilities and will help companies comply with new regulations, such as the EU’s Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA).
Rocket Software added support for the browser-based development environment VS Code last fall with the launch of Rocket DevOps version 10.2.2. Customers will find the new release of Rocket DevOps improves on that initial VS Code support, says Puneet Kohli, the president of the Rocket’s Application Modernization Business Unit.
“The capabilities are much more native. You can do a lot more with the VS Code and RPG Free Form now,” Kohli says. “It’s the context level menu. You right click on your code, you can generate, you compile, you can execute right there from the editor – all of those capabilities.”
With this release, Rocket DevOps offers the same level of support for VS Code as it does for Rational Developer for i (RDi), IBM’s flagship Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) for IBM i.
“If somebody has been using RDi for years and they now switch to VS Code, we want to give them the exact same experience,” Kohli says. “Our approach [with supporting VS Code] has been very similar to RDi.”
VS Code adoption has skyrocketed in the IBM i installed based over the past three years. According to the latest IBM i Marketplace Survey from Fortra, RDi was used by 56 percent of IBM i shops, whereas VS Code was used by 37 percent. Meanwhile, the greenscreen tools that make up Application Development Toolset (ADTS), including SEU and PDM, were nearly ubiquitous, with an 80 percent market share.
“The community definitely adopted [VS Code] quite quickly, and we were getting quite a bit of feedback from our customers saying hey, when are you going to have VS Code support,” Kohli says. “So we very quickly added support [with 10.2.2 in September], but that was just the initial incarnation. We’ve been continuing to add new capabilities.”
Rocket DevOps 10.3.1 also brings full support for Free Format RPG, which is another trending new capability among IBM i developers. Before this release, Rocket only supported fixed-format RPG with DevOps, Kohli says.
The combination of Free Format RPG and VS Code support shows that Rocket is serious about making it as easy as possible for IBM i developers to support modern coding environments, he says.
“If you’re integrating with modern tooling, now it’s pretty seamless,” Kohli says. “You don’t have to jump through hoops to get integrate into Git or Jenkins. Or if you have Python code, Free Format RPG is very similar to Python in terms of the syntax, so it’s easier” to adopt.
Rocket has also bolstered the code testing capabilities of its DevOps suite, which is based in part on the LMi product it obtained with its Aldon acquisition over a decade ago along with other tooling and capabilities.
Many IBM i shops would prefer to use production data to test the changes they have made in their applications, but data privacy and security regulations make that problematic, Kohli says. With Rocket DevOps 10.3.1, the vendor has simplified the process of obtaining suitable data for testing code.
“We have made it a lot easier for you to be able to anonymize that data that you’re pulling in from production to be used in your test environment,” he says. “We added capabilities to add rules so you can do field-level rules to say hey, a date field has to have a certain rule. So if I make the change to that date field, I should be able to test it with a very particular amount of data that goes into that field.”
This release also brings improvements to Rocket DevOps regulatory compliance capabilities, particularly as it relates to DORA, a new IT requirement the European Union enacted in January 2023 and will begin enforcing in January 2025.
DORA is similar in some respects to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), another regulation that came out of the EU. But instead of focusing on consumer data privacy, DORA mandates minimum standards with regards to data security and application availability.
“DORA is going to be a lot more stringent on what changes are being made, where the data is, how the data is getting moved,” Kohli says. “Anybody who’s running a production or SaaS system that has customer data now has to be able to show that they can replicate that, that they have an HA and DR process to manage that.”
Rocket DevOps has been updated to support the generation of DORA compliance reports. Rocket has published a white paper on DORA titled “Bringing Security and Resilience Into Alignment: Preparing for the Digital Operational Resilience Act,” which you can find here.
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