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Alex Woodie

Alex Woodie is Senior Editor at IT Jungle. He was previously editor of two of IT Jungle's main newsletters, Four Hundred Stuff and The Windows Observer. Prior to joining Midrange Server (as Guild Companies was formerly called) in October 2001, Alex was a products editor at now defunct publisher Midrange Computing, where he was first introduced to the AS/400 and covered hardware, software, and services for Midrange Technology SHOWCASE magazine. Before joining Midrange Computing, Alex was a staff writer for The Insurance Journal and a reporter and columnist with The Paradise Post newspaper. Woodie obtained his Bachelors of Arts degree in journalism from Humboldt State University in 1997. Upon graduation, Alex intended to make his way onto a major daily newspaper, but in 1999 he found himself drawn to the high-technology industry, where his background in science and engineering has suited him well. He lives in Northern San Diego County. When he is not writing next week's newsletters, Alex can be found in his favorite chair reading the day's paper, in the kitchen, or at the beach.

  • Big Blue Delivers IBM i Customer Requests In ACS Update

    August 25, 2025 Alex Woodie

    Christmas is still four months away, but that didn’t stop IBM from giving Access Client Solutions (ACS) customers the new features they requested. The deliveries were made in the mid-summer update, ACS version 1.1.9.9.

    ACS is the must-have tool that lives in every IBM i professional’s toolbox. It contains a slew of facilities for interacting with the system, including RSS, data transfer, IFS file viewing, spool file management, 5250 emulator, 5250 printer emulation, and a virtual console for LAN and HMC management.

    IBM updates ACS several times a year regardless of the Technology Refresh cycle, as is typical with several …

    Read more
  • New DbToo SDK Hooks RPG And Db2 For i To External Services

    August 25, 2025 Alex Woodie

    A team of open source developers led by IBM’s Jesse Gorzinski have developed an experimental new software development kit (SDK) designed to integrate RPG applications and Db2 for i data with external services. The SDK, dubbed DbToo, initially targets watsonx, Ollama, OpenAI endpoints, Kafka, Slack, and Twilio, providing another option for integrating IBM i with popular AI models and messaging services.

    The mainstream IT world is currently evolving at a tremendous pace, largely driven by open source big data projects as well as large language models (LLMs) that promise to automate a range of functions currently performed by humans. The …

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  • 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 …

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  • IBM To Add Full System Replication And FlashCopy To PowerHA

    August 18, 2025 Alex Woodie

    IBM will be adding a pair of new technologies to PowerHA SystemMirror in the near future, including Full System Replication (FSR) and Full System FlashCopy (FSFC). The technologies are currently offered through the PowerHA Tools group of products via IBM Expert Labs (formerly Lab Services), but will become part of the mainstream PowerHA offering soon.

    FSR and FSFC have been available for years via IBM Expert Labs toolkits, where they have provided IBM i shops with additional forms of data and application protection above and beyond what they get with BRMS and PowerHA, both of which are still required with …

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  • You Can Now Get IBM Tech Support For VS Code For i

    August 11, 2025 Alex Woodie

    IBM i shops that were on the fence about migrating from Rational Developer for i and adopting VS Code for RPG and COBOL development just received one big reason why they should bite the bullet and make the move: the launch of a new technical support package for Code for i from IBM.

    Visual Studio Code is currently the most popular integrated development environment (IDE) on planet Earth, according to multiple measures, such as the Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey, which found Microsoft VS Code was used by 76 percent of all respondents, more than twice the usage of …

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  • IBM i: Pro and Con

    August 11, 2025 Alex Woodie

    Everybody has an opinion, and it seems that many people these days feel the need to share those opinions, for better or worse. When it comes to IBM i, the volume of sentiments may be lower than, say, the activities of tech CEOs at Coldplay concerts. However, the proprietary server still elicits thoughts and feelings, both positive and negative, as evidenced by reviews recently shared by the IT marketplace known as G2.

    G2 was founded back in 2012 with a simple goal: Provide actionable, crowdsourced information on enterprise IT software and gear, without requiring customers to shell out tens of …

    Read more
  • IBM Streamlines Data Migration With New Partition Mirror Tech

    July 28, 2025 Alex Woodie

    There is a brand new technology available for migrating data from one IBM i partition to another as part of IBM’s new Migrate While Active tool. It’s called partition mirror, and it gives IBM i shops a potentially less disruptive method for moving data across distances both long and short.

    IBM first unveiled its new Migrate While Active product in October 2024 as part of its announcement introducing subscriptions for the PowerHA high availability and Db2 Mirror continuous availability products. The co-mingling of the announcements made some sense when you consider that the original Migrate While Active product utilized a …

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  • Profound Logic Adds MCP To IBM i AI Tool

    July 28, 2025 Alex Woodie

    The world of AI is moving extremely fast right now, with new models, techniques, and technologies emerging every week. One of the newest bits of AI tech to catch on is Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), which has quickly become a defacto standard for connecting data sources to AI models. Profound Logic, which has been on the cutting edge of AI, is the first IBM i vendor to bring MCP support to the server and the Db2 for i database.

    Anthropic quietly launched Model Context Protocol in late November 2024 as a way to enable large language models (LLMs), such …

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  • BRMS Isn’t The Only Backup Product With A Security Problem

    July 21, 2025 Alex Woodie

    IBM last month patched a serious security flaw in BRMS, the built-in backup and recovery facility that it ships with the IBM i operating system. The flaw is the latest in a series of security flaws uncovered in backup tools, which cyber criminals appear to be now targeting.

    If you’re a regular reader of Doug Bidwell’s IBM i PTF Guide – and really, if you are responsible for managing an IBM i environment, you should be reading it regularly – then you already knew about the security flaw in BRMS. Bidwell covered the flaw and the associated emergency PTF for …

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  • Maxis Adds IBM i Support To Database Modernization Tool

    July 21, 2025 Alex Woodie

    Legacy applications are frequent targets for modernization efforts, but databases also need their share of TLC. One company that specializes in database modernization, Maxis Technology, recently announced support for IBM i and its integrated Db2 for i database with its flagship product, dubbed Alchemize.

    Maxis Technology is an Eagle Rock, Missouri, company that specializes in database modernization. Founded by Steve Cornell in 2011, Maxis develops the Alchemize database power tool, which allows developers and engineers to automate a range of database tasks, including: data migration and loading; data mapping and archiving; data transformations and cleanup; fixing data quality issues; optimizing …

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