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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.

  • Open Source IBM i Build Tool Now Supports VS Code

    July 24, 2024 Alex Woodie

    A new release of the open source iBuild tool now supports VS Code, the developer of the tool recently announced. The new release also now fully supports ILE, which is critical to the future of the IBM i platform, the iBuild creator says.

    iBuild is a free build tool that automates the task of running all of a developer’s RPG source code through the IBM compilers. It’s been in active development for about eight years and can be downloaded from sourceforge.net/projects/ibuild.

    What makes iBuild unique is that it puts instructions on how to build objects into the header of …

    Read more
  • What’s In the Latest Update to PowerHA

    July 24, 2024 Alex Woodie

    A handful of new capabilities have been released for PowerHA customers over the past few months, including support for asynchronous policy-based replication in FlashSystem, new administrative functions, support for SQL services, and the addition of new management functions in an updated Web interface.

    As IBM notes in its announcement letter for IBM i 7.5 TR4, there is a long history of integration between PowerHA SystemMirror for IBM i and IBM Spectrum Virtualize, the software for managing IBM FlashSystem SAN arrays. This tradition includes native support in PowerHA for various Spectrum Virtualize replication mechanisms, including Metro Mirror (synchronous replication), Global Mirror …

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  • InterForm Sells Majority Stake to Private Equity Firm

    July 24, 2024 Alex Woodie

    InterForm A/S, the Danish output management vendor whose products are resold by Infor and other application vendors, has sold a majority stake of itself to VIA equity, a private equity firm also based in Denmark. InterForm says it will use the investment to accelerate business development around the world.

    InterForm A/S has been targeting IBM midrange systems with its output management software since the company was founded back in 1987. While it supports open systems today, it has more than 4,000 installations on IBM i and predecessor systems, which makes InterForm arguably the most heavily used output management system on …

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  • Fortra Leans On XDR For Full Spectrum Security

    July 22, 2024 Alex Woodie

    When it comes to security, more is often better. As in, more security professionals running more security products and services that deliver more overlapping coverage of your security weaknesses. The good news for IBM i shops is that Fortra delivers more solutions with more coverage than probably anyone else in the industry, particularly with its XDR solution.

    XDR, or extended detection and response, is the state of the art for enterprise security today, and essentially is replacing security information and event management (SIEM) tools at the top of the security food chain, says Tom Huntington, the vice president of technical …

    Read more
  • 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 …

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  • IBM Begins the Purge of Old Greenscreen Utilities

    July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

    IBM is prepping the IBM i community to prepare to adapt to some substantial changes that are coming with the next release of IBM i, including the end of support for a large swath of the Application Development ToolSet (ADTS) that ships with Rational Development Studio (RDS). Source Entry Utility (SEU) and Programming Development Manager (PDM) are not among the ADTS tools getting the boot, but that’s not stopping midrange professionals from speculating that their time in IBM i is limited, too.

    As part of its May 7 Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5, IBM issued a “software …

    Read more
  • Where Do RPG Programmers Come From? And Other IBM i Questions

    July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

    The IBM i community has faced a skills crunch off and on for the past decade or longer, as Baby Boomers retire and IBM i shops struggle to find replacements. One big reason for the hiring gap is that the old ways of finding new RPG programmers and other IBM i professionals no longer work like they used to, according to IBM i educator Jim Buck.

    “What they did for years was they just stole from the guys down the road,” said Buck, who is the president and CEO of IBM i training company imPower Technologies. ‘“I’ll go to …

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  • IBM Bolsters Data and App Integration with webMethods, StreamSets Acquisitions

    July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

    IBM i shops are among the customers that could benefit from IBM’s completion of its acquisition of webMethods and StreamSets, which it announced last week.

    In mid-December, IBM announced an agreement had been reached with Software AG and Silver Lake, the private equity firm that owned a majority of Software AG, to acquire webMethods and StreamSets for €2.13 billion, or $2.32 billion per the conversation rate at the time.

    The two deals significantly bolster IBM offerings in the fields of data and application integration, which are areas of growing concern due to the rising popularity of artificial intelligence and the …

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  • Big Blue Working On Replacement For Global Solutions Directory For IBM i

    July 8, 2024 Alex Woodie

    IBM is developing a website to replace the Global Solutions Directory, which it recently killed off. The new site should allow customers to search through a comprehensive list of IBM i applications serving specific industries, just like they could with the Global Solutions Directory.

    For years, IBM’s Global Solutions Directory served as the go-to mechanism for researching the wide breadth of IBM i software products available around the world. If you needed to know what kind of banking solutions existed on IBM i version 6.1 for midsized American credit unions, or what the market looked like for Indonesian construction equipment …

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  • Profound Brings GenAI Tech To IBM i Apps with Profound AI

    June 24, 2024 Alex Woodie

    For more than 20 years, Profound Logic has been at the cutting edge of bringing the latest Web, mobile, and API technology to IBM i shops. With the launch of Profound AI, it’s now helping IBM i shops adopt the latest in user interface tech: natural language and generative AI.

    GenAI has taken the world by storm since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022. Since then, nearly every large enterprise has explored the potential for using large language models (LLMs) to develop a range of GenAI products, including chatbots, autonomous agents, question-and-answering systems, and knowledge management apps.

    Despite the potential …

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