Tool Aims To Streamline Git Integration For Old School IBM i Devs
August 18, 2025 Alex Woodie
There’s one school of thought that says IBM i developers should embrace the DevOps revolution and start using mainstream tools like Git and Jira for managing and deploying code. But there’s also a pool of old school programmers who are reluctant to give up their established ways and means. Richard Schoen hopes to bring these worlds together with an update to the iForGit tool from his company MobiGoGo’s that streamlines Git integration for old school IBM i devs who still use PDM and SEU.
Schoen launched his iForGit tool about seven years ago to provide some degree of Git integration for IBM i developers working in environments like Rational Developer for i, VS Code, and SEU/PDM. The basic goal of the software is to capture the changes that developers made to source code in those environments and move them to a Git repository. That can check some boxes for IBM i shops that have a mandate to use Git without adopting a full-blown change management system, he says.
“You can visualize all the changes over in Git and see who actually modified the line of code the last time around,” he tells IT Jungle. “So it gives them that auditability that they don’t have right out of the box without having to necessarily go to a large change management project.”
Schoen, who worked at HelpSystems (now Fortra) following its 2014 acquisition of RJS Software and now is on his own with his new company MobiGoGo, recently announced an update to iForGit that expands the integration with older development tools like SEU and PDM. The software now includes several utilities that make it easier for developers to accomplish tasks without leaving the comfort of their green screen interface.
One of those utilities allows developers to see all of the versions of code stored in directly from the green screen interface. That will streamline the workflow for developer and reduce the amount of busy work they must do to accomplish that task, Schoen says.
“Typically if you want to bring a version of source back from Git, you have to go out to the Web browser…and there’s all these steps you have to go through,” he says. “So I built a UI in this is for the green screen users so essentially they can go next to a source member and say ‘Show me the versions.’ It brings up a list of all those versions, and they just put a file next to it, or there’s a restore option they can restore right from their green screen in a single click practically.”
Accessing and viewing Git source versions from PDM in iForGit.
“It’s just making the green screen tighter,” Schoen continues. “There’s still a lot of PDM users out there, even though I know IBM’s trying to deprecate it. So it helps to look at the history logs from the green screen very easily.
Using Git doesn’t necessarily come easy for the traditional IBM i developer. In the open systems world, developers might be working on five or six source members at a single time, which Git can help coordinate. But in classic IBM i development, a developer is working with a single source member stored on the IBM i. Adding Git to the IBM i process takes
“So it’s just two different styles of development,” Schoen says. “They’re trying to fit the classic PDM style development into Git, and get people to work in the Git style of development process, but it actually adds steps to their whole process of working. It takes five or six steps to do what they were doing. I’ve said, why don’t we just adapt what you’re already doing and make it simple? I’ll give you a one-step push to get what you need, to pull something back, and give you an option to do that. It just makes that whole process work and be more integrated for the green screen types.”
Schoen doesn’t work exclusively on IBM i these days. He’s development integration software at MobiGoGo that targets Windows, Linux, Mac, and cloud environments in addition to IBM i. He’s also working with integrating large language models (LLMs) into existing systems, too.
iForGit costs $1,800 per partition. For more information, see http://www.mobigogo.net.
