What’s Cooking In Code For IBM i?
July 15, 2024 Alex Woodie
With IBM beginning to pull back on green screen development tools for IBM i, the importance of Code for IBM i to the IBM i development community has never been greater. The good news is that there’s a lot of development activity at the moment around the Visual Studio Code plug-in, with new features to replace some of the outgoing greenscreen functionality.
IBM announced that it was killing off some of the green screen development tools in its Application Development Toolset (ADTS) as part of its Technology Refresh (TR) for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5 in early May. Among the tools getting the boot on April 30, 2025, will be RLU, SDA, FCMU, AFP, CGU, and DFU.
IBM said replacement functionality for the discontinued ADTS components will be found in Rational Developer for i (RDi) and Code for IBM i, among other tools. Considering the pace adoption of Code for i (Code4i), which already used by 37 percent of the midrange, according Fortra’s IBM i Marketplace Study for 2024, that product would seem to be a good bet to receive its share of new functions.
Liam Allan, who co-created Code4i before joining IBM two years ago and still leads its development, shared some future development ideas for the product during the recent COMMON POWERUp conference.
During the session – which Allan hosted along with Jesse Gorzinski, the IBM i business architect for open source, and Scott Forstie, the IBM i business architect for Db2 for i – Allan threw out a range of new product ideas to the audience. Some of the ideas clearly resonated with the crowd, while others did not.
Here are the ideas for new Code4i features that Allan, Gorzinski, and Forstie bounced off the COMMON audience, and their approximate, completely non-scientific response:
- A WYSIWYG editor: The crowd seemed to like this idea, particularly with Screen Design Aid (SDA) going away
- A CL prompter: The crowd didn’t seem to like this one
- The capability to change server-side settings – Crowd wasn’t too excited
- End of support for Code4i in IBM i 7.3 by 2025: This one resonated with the crowd
- Remote debugging for Node and Python on IBM i: Yes
- AI-powered dev tools for RPG and SQL: Yes
- Enterprise support for Code4i (bug fixes, etc.) from IBM: Maybe. Audience was non-committal
- Provide database advice in VSCode for SQL: Maybe. Audience was non-committal
- Integration with IBM’s Integrated Web Services (IWS) server: No
- Include package management in Code4i? No, just use ACS
- Support for COBOL: Yes
- SQL Formatter: No, it’s better off in ACS, the audience said
- Support for Code Outline: Yes, make it more like RDi, the audience said
- Better CL formatting: Yes
- Support for code snippets, or insert by example: Yes
Whether or not these features do make it into Code4i is not certain. It would seem that, given the looming end of support for some ADTS tools next year (such as SDA), some of these features will almost certainly be added. It is also possible that the Code4i community could add other features that Allan, Gorzinski, and Forstie did not mention that day in Fort Worth.
In any event, it is clear that momentum for Code4i is building as IBM i developers seek alternatives to traditional IDEs, such as RDi, and ancient tools, such as SEU and PDM. Those two green screen tools escaped the Big Blue axe this round, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be around in 10 years.
It doesn’t hurt that Microsoft’s VS Code has emerged as the most popular IDE in the world. It all adds up to a wonderful opportunity for IBM i professionals to move to modern, easy-to-use, and free tooling to develop and maintain their ILE applications, and that’s good news for IBM i.
New updates of Code4i are released continually from its GitHub page at github.com/codefori/vscode-ibmi.
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