Remain Begins Migrating DevOps Tools To VS Code

June 9, 2025 Alex Woodie

For years, Remain Software was 100 percent devoted to Rational Developer for i (RDi) IBM’s flagship development tool for IBM i. It was a good bet, as the bulk of the market used RDi. However, in recent years, popularity of VS Code has soared, and now Remain is embarking upon a major project to redevelop all of its DevOps functionality to work with the browser-based IDE.

Wim Jongman, the managing editor of Remain Software, started working on the company’s flagship change management product for AS/400, TD/OMS back in 1992. During its iSeries years in the early 2000s, Remain pivoted toward IBM’s Java-based Eclipse technology, which formed the basis for RDi and other IDEs. It

“When Eclipse came up around the turn of the century, I was deeply involved in all that stuff,” Jongman told IT Jungle at the recent COMMON POWERUp conference. “So I have spent, let’s say, all my prime open-source years on Eclipse.”

At that time, it was the top IDE, with a 90 percent adoption rate in the IBM midrange community. The pace of development of RDi was brisk, and all of the change management and programmer utility vendors responded by developing plug-ins to make their products work in RDi.

“But at some point, when you keep adding stuff to it, and everybody makes their plugins and don’t really know what they are doing, then you just dig your own grave with such a solution,” Jongman said. “And then when something new comes up…”

That something new is VS Code. Several years ago, just a few people on IBM i developed in VS Code. But thanks to the work of Liam Allan and his Code for i plug-in, which made RPG development possible in VS Code, adoption has skyrocketed. In 2024, VS Code reached parity with RDi, with a 54 percent adoption rate, according 2025 IBM i Marketplace Study by Fortra. By next year, use of VS Code will eclipse SEU (used by 77 percent of Marketplace respondents), IBM i chief technology officer Steve Will predicted.

Remain Software has offered some support for VS Code for two-and-a-half years, Jongman said. But the level of integration between TD/OMS and VS Code is not where it needs to be to support a full enterprise change management experience, he said.

“It was okay for your developer experience,” he said. “But if you want to do full-fledged change management with everything in there, like reporting, Kanban sheets, dashboards, task lists, promotions–the whole shebang–that takes time to port that to VS Code.”

The work has already started, but it will take years to complete, said Jongman, who estimated that Remain had about 50 developer-years invested in honing its software for RDi. The company is also using the project to take a clean-sheet approach to its architecture for TD/OMS and related products.

“We learned a lesson from it,” he said. “We thought Eclipse was the thing that would stay forever. But when you start with VS code, is that going to be around forever? Maybe not. Looking at the pattern, what is the one thing that looks like it’s going to stay pretty long? In my opinion, it’s Web technology. So we so we are focusing on Web technology.”

In developing TD/OMS to work with RDi, Remain essentially took every green screen panel and created a new Eclipse panel based on it. That’s not how the company is going to develop its next-gen TD/OMS, which will work from a centralized component.

“So when you now open a task inside VS Code, you don’t have a separate view to see the task history or a separate view to see the connected objects to it,” Jongman said. “That’s all embedded in that one component [in the new product]. So you open your task and you see the history, you see it’s connected to JIRA ticket, you see what objects are attached to it that we are currently developing. So it’s a little bit different, a more centralized approach to where people can find information.”

The redeveloped TD/OMS plug-ins that Remain is developing will give customers largely the same experience on the Remain side. TD/OMS customers like how it works, Jongman said, including how easy it is to promote and check out code.

“We want to give them that same experience,” he said. “But it’s going to look a little bit nicer. We can use we use Web technology so we can do a little bit more in terms of user interface experience.”

Remain used to rely on the JTOpen Java toolbox for JDBC connectivity from TD/OMS to IBM i. As part of its redevelopment effort, it will adopt REST Web services.

Jongman doesn’t have a timeline for when the entire project will be done. A lot will depend on what customers need. For instance, TD/OMS customers need to integrate with 20 different ticketing systems, and customers will determine which ones Remain tackles first. For ticketing, Jira will be first.

“What we have now built is a very functional deployment engine, change management engine inside VS Code,” he said. “So it’s out there. Customers can take it, and then we just wait for them to say, okay, hey, we miss this functionality.”

Remain has some large IBM i shops who are currently migrating from RDi to VS Code, including one shop with 80 developers making the shift. Remain will be working with them to make sure the change is well-managed.

“We see a lot of interest in VS Code,” Jongman said. “But the bigger companies that have their whole workflow already set in RDi, it’s a big change for them.”

The company will support RDi indefinitely, as the IDE will likely continue to be used by some clients. The emergence of VS Code is impacting other Remain products too. For instance, it will stop development on Mi Workplace, its lightweight, RDi-based IDE with a browser interface that it launched several years ago. Work to port API Studio has not yet begun.

Gravity, Remain’s project and workflow management software for IBM i, has already been moved to VS Code, Jongman said. It’s also already supporting some VS Code features in Octo, a Web-based product that exposes some TD/OMS functionality, such as work management, ratification, task and object management.

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